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Will the children of today be the eBook readers of tomorrow?

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Will the children of today be the eBook readers of tomorrow?

Emphatically, yes. Will we, as their parents and grandparents, speak the same literary language they do? I assert that we must. We must embrace the new digital format for reading books and continue to read into the future, as leaders in a new literary country. And this is not a country for nostalgic resistance. Pick up your iPad or your Sony Reader proudly. Save the book stores that you love by buying paper books and using their websites as your source for downloading your digital books. Download, save, read, notate, enlarge, consume the words as never before. Become e-savvy. Choose to join the wave and don’t be left behind in the papered world of old books that must crumble to dust, as all things worldy must. Open your mind to the possibilities.

As a book seller at Village Books I’ve heard arguments on both sides of this issue. The romantic booksellers say, ‘No, nothing will ever satisfy like a paper book, with pages to turn, pages to write one’s thoughts on the margins, to carry in one’s hand.’ However, I will own both: paper books and eBooks. Nothing can diminish the physical beauty of the paper books I’ve filled my home with, the books I carry everywhere I go, the books I read in bed late into the night.

And yet… And yet, I also love the new technology. I will download a portable library to take with me, in my back pack, with my water bottle, with my writing journals, and I will continue to feed my book-hungry brain with the tools of our new age. My iPad will become my new portable bookshelf.

What will I download first? Shakespeare? Mary Oliver’s poetry? The Zen texts of Thich Nhat Hanh? How about the new biography of Teddy Roosevelt? How about a Sudoku book?

I recently read a study in which children, who are reluctant readers, will actually read more books on a digital reader than an intimidating book with many pages. The answer to the teaching of literacy to recalcitrant young students may actually be in a electronic hand-held device. If that is what it takes to get kids to read, I’m all for it. Remember, it is the message, as well as the medium, that prevails. It is the words, the story, not the physical book that we absorb. Words trump book. –Cindi

Posted on Mar 24th, 2011 by Village Books in Children, Young Adult, books, ebooks

No, Really, Call Me

Even though, as Pamela Paul writes in the Times, people don’t use the phone so much anymore, especially in offices, preferring less intrusive methods of communication like e-mail and text-message, I still love the phone and I talk on it a lot. And so do most of the people who sit in the cubicles around me. I know pretty much everything there is to know about my co-workers’ children and pets and parents, which might seem like a curse but which I find kind of charming—it gives each day a bit of character and makes the workplace feel more human.

I also have to point out a curious transference of an ancient telephonic affliction from the telephone to e-communication: that of the corruption of the meaning of a message. As Rebecca Stefoff writes in her history, “The Telephone”:

Telephones have always lent themselves to comedy because of their potential for miscommunication. Overheard or misunderstood phone conversations, wrong numbers caused by overworked switchboard operators or misdialings, children’s prank calls…all have been the subjects of jokes, humorous songs and stories, and television sitcoms.

But now, “You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” as as a publicity director at a major publishing house puts it to Paul in the Times.

That’s right: modern games of telephone are played not on the line but online, and are only cleared up by reaching for a telephone. I would go so far as to say that no one ever understands what I’m trying to say in a text message, and my success with e-mail is only marginally better. With the telephone, the expressive power of body language is lost, but with e-mail, the subtleties of voice go, too, and if you’ve ever tried to have an argument with your friend about some minor thing, like where to go to dinner, and ended up cancelling dinner altogether because of hurt feelings, you know how ridiculous things can get. Emoticons, which state with zero subtlety the emotion a message is intended to convey, help a bit, but not if one refuses to use them.

So, yes, I think the telephone is a wonderful mode of communication—not for all business calls (we’d all die, I think, if our e-mail in-boxes were filled with voice messages that needed to be returned), but for some, and for many sorts of personal calls, including, as the art in this post suggests, the flirty call. Stefoff writes:

Since the telephone’s early days, it has been associated with romance—all kinds of romance, spanning the spectrum from innocent flirtation to seduction, and even adultery. Nineteenth-century songwriters and artists portrayed the telephone as “Cupid’s Messenger.” The love connection runs through the entire history of the telephone in popular culture, from a 1905 smiling telephone operator making a date to Nicholson Baker’s 1992 novel, Vox, a story of passion between two people who are mistakenly connected by a wrong number.

Wooohoo! “Vox”! One of the best telephone novels ever written (it isn’t really flirty—it’s downright filthy (Monica gave it to Bill!)—and telephones can indeed be used for that sort of thing, too). I’ve written before about e-communication and romance, and I think that this is actually one area where the increased likelihood of misunderstanding—hidden meanings, double entendres—is a good thing. What Rock and Doris could have done with G-chat!

(Image via Dusted Off.)

Posted on Mar 23rd, 2011 by Macy Halford in Pamela Paul, Rebecca Stefoff, The Telephone, e-communication

Cure Baldness, Kill Literature

Eryn Green writes this week at Esquire about research regarding stem cells and male pattern baldness, pointing to a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine that provides hope for men keen on keeping hair on their heads. Experimenting with mice, scientists determined that “dormant follicular stem cells can be stimulated to cause the regeneration of hair,” Green writes. Luis Garza, an author of the study, tells Green:

I think it’s very likely that by the end of your lifetime, there will be a pill or a cream, kind of like there is for Viagra, which your insurance [might not] cover and you might have to apply repeatedly—but yeah, it’ll keep your hair growing.

High anxiety about baldness—and crazy chemical and cosmetic gymnastics to avoid it—seems to be a thing of the past, a staple of nineties infomercials and Rogaine ads. Yet it’s likely that a true cure—rather than a gimmicky stopgap—would spark widespread enthusiasm.

Science may soon be able to save our hair, but consider the greater loss to literature. Readers and writers of the future would be denied new versions of the likes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, whose bald head—along with his stately barrel chest—becomes a central image of his personality. We meet Timofey Pnin:

Ideally bald, sun-tanned, and clean-shaven, he began rather impressively with that great brown dome of his, tortoise-shell glasses (masking an infantile absence of eyebrows), apish upper lip, thick neck, and strong-man torso in a tight-ish tweed coat, but ended, somewhat disappointingly, in a pair of spindly legs (now flanneled and crossed) and frail-looking, almost feminine feet.

And later, a weekending Pnin struggles with the particulars of American locomotion:

The color of his green sport shirt was undone; his party unzipped windbreaker seemed too tight for his impressive torso; his bronzed bald head, with the puckered brow and conspicuous vermicular vein on the temple, bent low as he wrestled with the door handle and finally dived out of the car.

Imagine Pnin, perfectly ridiculous as a kind of diminutive, professorial Yul Brenner, topped with a mess of hair. Would he have the neat and short collegiate cut of the era? Or perhaps he’d let his hair grow long, aping the youth movement? Pnin’s various scrapes and other escapades might be made even more amusing if they left him with hair tousled and spiked out of place. But he’d be robbed of his idiosyncratic dignity. And his head would lose its attractive power for insects, one of Nabokov’s pet interests. Gone would be this fine moment of slapstick:

A horsefly applied itself, blind fool, to Pnin’s bald head, and was stunned by a smack of his meaty palm.

Or this luminous celestial image:

A quiet, lacy-winged little green insect circled in the glare of a strong naked lamp above Pnin’s glossy bald head.

Fiction thrives on physical particularities. As cosmetic medicine thinks of new ways to make us all look the same, we should cling to the notable differences, lest the great characters of our literature come to seem quaintly deformed to readers in the future. Here’s to the “ideally bald” characters of the past and present. Who are your favorites?

Posted on Mar 22nd, 2011 by Ian Crouch in Pennsylvania, Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, baldness