Things fall apart

After my last post about the Kindle and my wariness of e-texts, I have to follow up by saying that I more than understand the need to digitize older books.

Case in point, this relic of my childhood, The Cookie Book, which I got through the Scholastic Book Club at school when I was probably seven or eight (the publication date is 1973).

This was clearly not a book that was made to last:  printed on cheap pulp paper, it's literally falling apart:  the spine long ago broke, and the pages are loose, crumbling, and discolored by age and splattered cookie batter.

And yet, I can't bring myself to throw it away because I have such a sentimental attachment to it.  And what's more, I still use it:  I maintain that it has the best peanut-butter cookie recipe ever in it (even though it never worked well at high altitude in Colorado).

I could buy a "new" (used) copy--there appear to be plenty of them available for next-to-nothing on abebooks.  And the recipe isn't exactly complicated:  I could easily have typed it up in far less time than it took me to write this blog. 

But there's something important to me about seeing the recipe in its original form, with the kitschy 1970s illustrations and the over-detailed and vaguely patronizing instructions ("Use an 'eating' teaspoon.'").  What keeps it on the shelf is, in fact, its very falling-apartness, and the flour stains and the marginal annotations in my eight-year-old hand.  It's been well used and loved.  

I recently broke down and scanned the pages with the recipe, though I stopped short of scanning the whole book.  I still won't throw it away, but I've seen enough of what can happen to this kind of paper after decades to know that eventually it really will be nothing but a pile of brittle brown confetti.  Thank goodness for digitization, which allows us to shore up literal fragments against a book's inevitable ruin (apologies to T. S. Eliot). 

Will anyone hold onto an e-book for nearly forty years?  Or am I comparing apples to oranges?  Or just being a hopeless, old-fashioned, curmudgeonly twit?

Let me have a cookie and think it over.

 
(Pictured above is the dressed-up holiday version of the peanut-butter cookies:  baked in mini-muffin tins and decorated with a Hershey's kiss.  Click on the recipe image for a larger, more readable version if you want to try it out!)

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

I know you're not supposed to.  But...

A couple months ago I was gifted with a Kindle for my work with an educational group on campus.  Ironically, not long before I got it, I'd had a conversation with my mom about e-readers, and when she asked if I thought I'd ever want one, I said no.

You'd never have guessed that had been my answer if you'd heard my squeals of girlish glee when I opened the box and saw the Kindle.  Apparently, I did want an e-reader!

I've been using the Kindle long enough now, though, that I think I'm ready to weigh in about it.  I nearly wrote that my verdict was "meh," but that's too negative. 

I really do like the thing.  It's especially great for taking to the rec center.  In the past, I've stuck to reading magazines while I'm on the elliptical machine, because they're easier to keep open than a book.  Short of breaking the spine or bringing something to clip or weigh down the sides, there's no way to get a book to lay flat, and holding it open is just a pain. 

 And I love the fact that you can download samples of books--generally, the first couple of chapters.  I've found this especially great for new young-adult books, which I often want to preview as possible texts for my YA lit class.  The samples give enough of a sense of the text to let me know if it's something I want to buy.  

But if I do buy those books, I buy hard copies, because I can't imagine using the electronic text in class, unless everyone was using that text.  At a recent book study group I attended at a local high school, several folks had read the book on their school-provided Nooks, and it was hard to pinpoint specific quotes or passages, since their versions didn't have page numbers.  

E-readers do offer some impressive advantages for course readings, since most allow you to bookmark or highlight text, add notes, and see what other readers have highlighted.  But not being able to get everyone on the same page, literally, is a serious disadvantage.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my family got together at a cabin in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio.  I'd brought the Kindle along, since I had a couple books on there that I'd downloaded, and wanted to have plenty of reading material.  When I went to grab it on the first night, thinking I'd read in bed, I couldn't find it.  After a prolonged search, I concluded that I must've left it at home after all.  In desperation, the next day I drove into the nearest town and bought a couple of books at WalMart.

I chose two that I ended up loving:  the latest in the Wimpy Kid series, and Rhoda Janzen's memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress.  

The first, a sort of hybrid traditional/graphic YA novel, just seems like something that wouldn't work on the Kindle, given the importance of the juxtaposition of the pictures and the text.  The other, of course, would be perfectly adaptable to e-reading, but I loved the book so much that as soon as I got home I passed it along to a friend...something you simply can't do with an electronic book.  

And therein lies my big problem with the Kindle and other e-readers:  they strike me as being inherently undemocratic.  You can't pass books you read on them along to someone else.  And at the moment, most texts are in proprietary formats, so since I use the Kindle, I can't buy or download books from Borders, or the new Google Bookstore.

I've also had some technical problems with the Kindle.  One book I purchased (Scott Westerfeld's Pretties) was so badly formatted it was almost unreadable.  My suspicion, from the kinds of errors it had, was that it was created by scanning the actual printed text.  Nearly every page had some kind of weird glitch like “Urn” for “Um” (as in “Urn, kind of”); “Fm” for “I’m”; and missing periods and other punctuation problems, as in the line "I know that was an unpleasant experience Tally But it was necessary We needed to take our children back from the Smoke, and only you could help us.”

But there were other problems that were less due to formatting and more just, well, unbelievable in a book put out by a big publishing house like Simon & Schuster--to wit, "The icy water crushed her like a vice.”

If it had been a free download, fine.  But I'd paid $9 for it.  Fortunately, Amazon's Kindle site allows readers to report formatting problems with books, and removes them from the store until they're cleaned up.

The bigger problem developed a week or so ago, when a vertical white line appeared on the screen, running all the way from top to bottom.  Initially, I assumed this was a problem with the particular file I was reading, but it turned out to be ubiquitous.  I tried to read past it, but it was really annoying.  After trying the troubleshooting tips Amazon mentions on its site to no avail, I called, and customer service said I'd need to return it.

Again, to Amazon's credit, they were incredibly helpful and generous about it.  I received a new Kindle the very day after I called, and Amazon sent along a link to print a postage-paid return label to send back the defective unit. 

My other concern about e-readers has to do with privacy.  On the one hand, the sort of "plain brown wrapper" nature of the readers themselves allow folks to read whatever they like in public (for example, see this interesting New York Times article about the popularity of romance novels on e-readers).

On the other hand, Amazon knows exactly what I've downloaded, and when, and whether it's still on my Kindle or not.  And because I can only buy books from Amazon, they have comprehensive knowledge of my Kindle library.  

I don't mean to be paranoid about it, but this does make me a little nervous.  In 2002, the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver fought a police order to hand over a particular customer's purchasing history.  This person was wanted on drug charges, and the cops thought they could bolster their case by demonstrating how the books he'd bought at the Tattered Cover incriminated him.  The state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the bookstore, and the case is often held up as a precedent for later decisions that protect the privacy of patrons' library records in terrorism investigations.  

I'd like to say I believe that Amazon would be as vigilant about protecting its customers' right to privacy as the Tattered Cover was.  But I'm not sure I can.  (Ah, Tattered Cover!  How I miss you!)

But for all my trepidation, I still love the Kindle.  And the main thing it's shown me is that all the "e-reader revolution" rhetoric is overblown.  Will they change people's reading habits?  Sure.  Will they replace paper books?  Heck no.  Each format has its own particular functions and aesthetics, and I suspect that people will sort out for themselves which one works best for them in specific contexts.

After all, as devoted a computer user as I am, there are still some things I'll only write by hand:  thank-you notes, grocery lists, comments on student papers.  

And nothing, nothing will ever replace for me the pleasure of browsing through a bookstore--looking at covers, picking up things that look interesting and flipping through them, finding a used copy of an out-of-print mystery that I've been looking for for years.  

But you'd better believe that the next time I go on a long trip, I'll take an equal amount of pleasure in downloading weeks' worth of reading onto a slim device that only weighs a few ounces.

A few thoughts on being a student again

On top of all the stuff I've learned this week about audio production from concept to finish, it has also been an enlightening and at times tremendously painful experience to be a student again.

One thing I wasn't expecting--but which is, of course, true in every class--is that there was a huge range of experience among the participants, from seasoned radio professionals to people like me, who knew they wanted the knowledge but were clueless.

The thing is, I'm not a very patient learner. I knew that about myself already, but it became a real obstacle this week. Every day, multiple times a day (and often multiple times an hour), I'd modulate from being exhilarated to being frustrated to tears, literally, and constantly felt like I must be the stupidest person in the world. So stupid, in fact, that I wasn't about to ask for help because then everyone would discover just how stupid I truly was. And I honestly had no idea whether I was "getting" it or not--at least, not for a loooong time.

As a teacher, I forget what that's like. I hope that I'm approachable, and I know I tell students to ask stupid questions, since (as the cliché goes), if you don't know the answer, it's not a stupid question. But this experience made me realize that you have to go a bit beyond that. And what seems most important is that you be accessible and patient and have time for those students who aren't confident or assertive enough to make those moves in the classroom itself.

These ideas tie into possible uses for audio in the classroom. We listened to an amazing audio diary piece written by a guy taking a course where college students traveled cross-country by train, studying Kerouac's On the Road en route. The person who played the piece had been on the trip, providing technical support, and said that the young man who wrote and narrated it was painfully shy. I could relate. I always do better, and feel more inclined to share, if I have a script. Hell, that's why I like being the teacher rather than the student.

What I did expect, and did encounter, was a run-in with my old nemesis, perfectionism. I have to say, though, that sheer exhaustion kept it at bay. Several times today while we were editing our final piece, I found myself saying things to my co-producer that were as much for myself as for her: for example, when she wanted to keep toying with the basic sequence of the story, I said it was fine as it was, and that I wanted to move on to the editing because that's the stuff I really needed to learn. And we did. And when we could've stayed for another hour or two tinkering with volume levels and other minutia, I finally convinced her that it was good enough as is.

Yeah, me saying good enough. I guess I have learned a lot this week.

Radio Rosie, on the air

I’m going to make an embarrassing and possibly diagnosable confession here: for years, when I was a kid, I used to narrate a radio show in my head on my way to and from school, a walk of about five minutes each way.

I’d like to be able to tell you that I was seven or so when this was going on, but I can clearly remember actively engaging in this activity until at least my freshman year of high school—at which point I also remember another part of my brain loudly telling me that it was time to grow out of that crap, that only weirdoes do that kind of thing.

In my adolescent fiction class, we often spend a good bit of time at the beginning of the semester talking about how adolescence differs from other life stages, and the biological, cultural, and (increasingly) neurological bases for those distinctions (see also “undeveloped cerebral cortex”).

But for me, that transition from childhood to full-blown teenagerhood boils down to the shift from the moment when those twin thoughts existed in my brain and the moment when the radio station went off the air for good. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened—and I won’t say that I didn’t still have a rich fantasy life after that—but the things I imagined afterwards were the garden-variety teen-girl fantasies about cute boys (and being a famous actress living in New York, married to the drum major, now a symphony conductor, or to Mikhail Baryshnikov. OK, so even my fantasies were geeky).

I wish to god that I could remember what the radio show was about, though. I know that it was a very sustained and episodic sort of fantasy; I can distinctly remember “part one: the walk home for lunch” picking up where it left off for the walk back to school afterwards, the baloney sandwich in between functioning as kind of a commercial break.

I’ve had the radio show on the brain lately, though, as I’ve been preparing for (and now attending) a digital-audio institute at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. In trying to piece together an understanding for myself of what it is I’m doing here, I’ve been starting to see connections between a lot of episodes in my life that I previously would have considered unrelated, from the radio show to my training in folklore to being a public-radio freak to my (probably annoying) affection for playing clips of various sonic materials in class.

And I really want to be able to do this stuff myself—in a sense, to make the radio-show fantasy a reality. Not in the talk-show sense (which is what I think the fantasy format was), but in the sense of bringing shape and life to the stories that most interest me in a way that makes them accessible to others…but without the kind of academic intrusiveness that’s often a part of “presenting” one’s fieldwork.

What I can tell you after the first 24 hours of this intensive workshop experience is that it’s all vastly more complicated than I ever imagined. It’s not unlike doing folklore fieldwork, in the sense of having to balance vision, intuition, and technical skill to get good materials. But the enormous number of additional considerations that come into play when you want to broadcast those recordings—well, it’s overwhelming. Where do you sit? Is the sound of the refrigerator running going to trash your whole session? How do you get people to speak in complete sentences and use the phrases you want them to use? Blah blah blah.

And christ, we haven’t even started talking about editing yet. That’s this morning. Gah! My head is going to explode! But possibly in a very good way…

Meme 123 & The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Previously, I noted my ignorance of Googlisms. Well, it appears that I'm also ignorant about Internet memes (and, as a folklorist, I should really be ashamed to admit that on several levels).

I've certainly received and participated in Internet memes without knowing that they had a name (again, "Duh, isn't that the exact experience students have in an intro to folklore class?"). But, unsurprisingly, the Wikipedia entry linked above is woefully insufficient.

So, if someone could explain Internet memes to me more thoroughly, I'd appreciate it. And tell me how they get their numbers...is this the techno-nerd-savvy version of knowing the tale-type number of Little Red Riding Hood? (AT333, BTW.)

Anyway, here's "meme 123," which I stumbled across recently, and which the rest of you probably have known about for years:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open it to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Pass the meme on to five more people, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

At the moment, I'm reading The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale. It's a terrific work of non-fiction that the author has structured like a classic English country-house mystery, since the case she describes here--the gruesome 1860 murder of a three-year old boy--was, in fact, the real-life prototype of that genre. (She does a great job of showing how later 19th-century detective novels borrow elements of the case, thus prolonging its notoriety.)

So, here's what's on page 123:

"In its influential editorial on the Road Hill murder, the Morning Post alluded to this case: 'That it should be a child [who killed Saville] would be incredible if Eugenie Plummer had not taught us to what length the wicked precocity of of some children will extend.' Eugenie's precocity was sexual, but it also rested in her cool deceit, her composure under pressure, the containment and channeling of her disturbance into bare lies. If newspaper readers had been horrified to find a clergyman convicted of sexually molesting a child in 1859, they must have been even more disturbed, a year later, to find the situation had been turned upside down to revel the child as the agent of evil, a creature who had undone a man's life with her lewd imaginings."

Oh, those wacky Victorians! (Hmm--there are strings of phrases in that excerpt that are likely to bring in a lot of unfortunate traffic. Ah well.)

Anyway, that passage both gives a taste of the text and doesn't do it justice. While I will say that Summerscale does get bogged down in documentation in some places (do we really need so many quotes from contemporary newspapers and letters?), for the most part, she accomplishes a difficult feat: putting together a text that is gripping, suspenseful, and scholarly all at once.

Behind the curve, as usual

OK, so y'all have probably long ago heard about "Googlisms." Or so I gather after going to a lecture the other day where the person introducing the speaker said "I found some Googlisms on [speaker's] name--I'm sure everyone's used it before" and I had that familiar feeling that, once again, I'm far more behind technologically than I ever imagined.

Fortunately, this is a no-brainer. I'm reminded of a freeware application I had years ago that would generate all the possible anagrams for any name or phrase you typed in. My favorite anagram for my own name was "a seamy hoary wrath," and Tom's best result was "the Fed's bathroom."

Among my favorite Googlisms:
hathaway is one more victim of cheap labor
hathaway is aware that any song recorded will stay with her a lifetime
hathaway is somewhat limited
hathaway is clearly abandoning realpolitik and seeking a moralistic scapegoat
hathaway is on a buying binge
hathaway is watching her own cinderella story unfold
hathaway is the only remaining heir to the throne
hathaway is auroramud's patron saint
hathaway is a diva
hathaway is always in the kitchen
hathaway is still getting her bearings around the press but she was at least willing to let it all down in front of our tape recorders

For an amusing five minutes, try it out! BTW, there are a million online anagram generators, if you have another few minutes to waste: here's one.

lolprofs

So, I'm teaching a class this semester called "Folk Literature"--great title, terrible course description: “The folk ballad, its origin, history, and literary significance.” That's it. Nothing else.

Since what I know about the Child ballads would take me all of about ten minutes to impart to students, I was a little stymied about what to do with the other hour and fifteen weeks. (Plus, as Don Yarman once brilliantly noted, "folk music is annoying," plain and simple.)

As the picture to the right illustrates, I decided to go straight for the jugular on the first day of class and implode the idea that folk literature is only about the ballad. We talked about internet fan fiction (which I believe is what I was discussing when a student snapped this photo) and "lolcat" pictures and language, among other topics.

So, as I said, the student apparently took this picture during class (unbenownst to me) and ran it through a "lolcat builder" page at mine.icanhascheezburger.com to create this image, then e-mailed it to me.

It's either the creepiest or most flattering tribute I've ever gotten from a student. (At any rate, it's way better than the lilac-scented-teddy-bear-in-a-tulip-shaped-mug that I got from a student once.) Either way, it was very reassuring: you know you're back in a real folklore class when all the wack jobs turn up. As George Bush famously said, they're my "base." Then there's the student who claims to be a traditional ballad singer. Oh yeah! And away we go...

Anyway, the student who mocked up this shot suggested that perhaps there should be a "lolprofs" website, which I think is a fabulous idea. Maybe I'll try to put together some other pics of unsuspecting colleagues and get a start on that...nah. I'm enough of a wack job as it is without going that route.