John Menick

After putting aside a couple hundred books for sale this week, I realized all books have a shelf life. Some books might be lifelong keepers, but many of the rest, including tell-alls about the Bush White House and histories of the Cold War, just end up taking up room after the first reading. The books may have been informative and worthwhile, but they don’t warrant the long-term shelf space. And when you are facing a few years of constant moving, as I am, keeping these books doesn’t make much sense at all.

I had been following the Kindle for a while, and was pretty skeptical of it at first. I didn’t like Amazon’s proprietary format, the high price, and the company’s apparent disinterest in the public library system. But looking at the books I had put aside, I started to understand that there is a kind of book that would do very well on a Kindle. So I decided to give it a try. I figured it would be perfect for two kinds of books: public domain books and timely books that may or may not be of interest in a couple of years.

The device is a wonder, and in many ways feels like the future of reading. The E Ink technology is as readable as printed ink, and the possibility of putting thousands of books in your suitcase is incredibly seductive. Many reviewers have complained about button positioning and the little joystick that navigates the device, but after using it for a week I found most of reviews to be nitpicking. In my mind, it’s no better or worse than the BlackBerry’s microscopic keyboard or the iPhone’s error-prone touchscreen technology. (Although, as a friend of mine said, touchscreen would make a lot of sense when you are flipping pages.)

There are line break issues with the public domain material, specifically Project Gutenberg texts, but they can be easily corrected by processing the document through Amazon’s formatting system. (Send an email to your Kindle email address with the document attached and receive it to your Kindle reformatted. You can pay a small fee for this and have it delivered to your Kindle directly, or choose the free option and have it emailed to your inbox.)

It’s been a week of reading on the device, and I can’t put it down. I’m halfway through one book (Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia) and have a few hundred public domain books waiting in the background. (I probably won’t get to the large majority of them, but no longer have to feel embarrassed about the yards of shelf space they would consume.)

The Kindle won’t replace every kind of book or reading experience. I can’t part with any of my art catalogs and artists books. I have a feeling screens can never replace paper for these kinds of books, and e-readers will probably drive up coffee table book prices even higher as more people turn to devices for black and white text.

The most unexpected change in my reading habits came with reading the New York Times. Amazon gives you the option of signing up for a free trial for the printed edition, and for the first time in years I am reading the paper front to back every day. The edition is delivered wirelessly to your Kindle every evening, and is deleted each day unless you decide otherwise. You can “clip” articles, notate and search them.

Like most people my age, I read most of my news online. The Web has made my reading broader — I’ve lost count of the number of news sources in my RSS reader — but it hasn’t become deeper. Someone once described the personal computer as a “distraction machine” — finish the first paragraph of a news article and in pops a new email, or an IM, or a friend calling on Skype. Getting to the end of a two-page article feels like a lucky break.

At the same time, printed papers are more rare, and about the only time I pick one up is when I’m traveling. Reading this way is a completely different level of engagement. In print, I’ll read most articles, and if I’m in the plane long enough, even the articles I have no interest in will at least get skimmed. Despite the fact that stories are ‘buried’ by editors, it’s much harder to do in print than online. The printed format encourages reading things that are on the twelfth page of business section, because there’s a greater chance of seeing every page. Everything feels more even, paradoxically more accessible.

On the Kindle, the experience is similar. You are provided with an index of all sections of the paper, but must forward through the paper one story at a time. Reviewers have complained about this, and it would be better to have a list of all articles available, but I ended up liking forwarding through letters and one-paragraph stories to get to the content I think I want. The process is less immediate, but it helps avoiding reinforcing your own reading biases.

The Kindle offers a lot, but it’s still lacking in two key areas. In specific:

* Will Amazon offer a plan for the public library system? If the e-book reader is going to be a serious part of any reader’s life, it needs to be integrated into the current lending libraries.

* Amazon’s contemporary American literature selection is almost non-existent. Searches for Faulkner, Pynchon, DeLillo, Roth, and Barthelme either returned no results or a few titles. It was easier to find more obscure authors than many of the most important American writers of the last fifty years. I’m sure it will improve, but if it doesn’t, the lack of selection will cripple the device.

Kindle support for libraries are a big concern for me. Building local libraries is a crazy idea: it’s incredibly redundant if you consider that you have to reproduce the same library everywhere ideally. Currently the New York Public Library has books available through DRMed Adobe PDFs and Mobipocket e-books, but the Kindle supports neither of these formats if the files have DRM. A sly program has been put in place by at least one library to loan out a Kindle pre-loaded with books, and although this is a clever trick, it’s not a real plan. A device-agnostic, federal rental system similar to iTunes’ rental service is what is needed. One database of all published books in the country might provide a reader with e-books that would remain readable for a limited time. Something like this would provide a big benefit to most of the country, specifically for people like me who grew up outside of an urban center and had to deal with horrible local libraries.

E-book readers will have to overcome a lot of technophobia and their own high cost, but if these devices stick around their prices will drop, just as the prices of personal computers and cell phones did and continue to do. Wider Kindle adoption doesn’t so much mean an end to the printed word, but lots of saved shelf space, fewer dead trees, and if there is a plan for libraries, a better national library system.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine, the artist Judi Werthein, asked me to participate in a book project she is organizing. The project involves, in her words, writing “a story you’ve been told about another artist’s work – a work that you yourself have not seen – anywhere in a composition book I’ll be sending you.” All of the contributions are going to be collected into a book due to be published next year. Mine follows. It’s a great project, but after writing my entry I really wanted to know: who made this artwork? If you know, contact me in the comments below. Here’s my entry:

Someone once told me about a work involving a video camera, a pirate VHF-UHF broadcaster, and a biplane. Maybe some high-power magnesium lamps were involved as well. The artist and a pilot (Maybe the same person?) would fly the said plane over a suburban neighborhood with the camera aimed at the houses below. I included the lamps in my own version because how else could the setup work at night, although I guess the artist may have only done it during the day.

Anyway, this was in the days of analogue broadcast television, when most people received their TV signal through set-top antenna (aka “rabbit ears”). The plane flew really low, I imagine dangerously low, and buzzed the roofs of the houses. The plane not only was videoing the houses, but was also broadcasting the live feed from the pirate VHF-UHF device. TV viewers, nestled into their couches, would first hear the plane real low in the distance. As the plane approached, the sound of the engines magnified, and suddenly the TV show was replaced by a moving image of the viewer’s house from above. The plane roared over, the perplexed viewer rubbed his or her eyes in disbelief, and then the miniature televisual house was replaced by The Price is Right or Johnny Carson or Tom and Jerry or whatever people watched when set-top receivers were the going thing. I’m not sure who did this insane intervention or who told me about it. I’m skeptical whether it would even work. But I wouldn’t mind trying it myself someday.

- John Menick 11/14/08

From Dis Voir:

Following his research in Poetics of Cinema, 1 on new narrative models as tools for apprehending a fast-shifting world, Raul Ruiz makes with Poetics of cinema 2 an appeal for an entirely new way of filming, writing and conceiving the image.

“Eleven years separate these lines from the first part of my Poetics of Cinema. Meanwhile the world has changed and cinema with it. Poetics of Cinema, 1 had much of a call to arms about it. What I write today Poetics of cinema 2 is rather more of a consolatio philosophica. However, let no one be mistaken about this, a healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism.

‘Light, more light,’were Goethe’s last words as he died. ‘Less light, less light,’ Orson Welles cried repeatedly on a set—the one and only time I saw him.
In today’s cinema (and in today’s world) there is too much light. It is time to return to the shadows. So, about turn! And back to the caverns!”. R.R

Available from Amazon.

Simon Sellars‘ Ballardian is an odd enterprise: not just a Web site devoted to the works of JG Ballard, but a blog devoted to events that are in some way Ballardian. Amazingly, it works. For example, see the recent entries on the UK parking bombings, and astronaut Lisa Nowak. “The suburbs dream of violence”…

(For your added reading pleasure, also see Sellars fascinating Guide to Micronations.)

From Lem’s sci-fi detective novel, The Investigation:

The little game has always fascinated Gregory when he was nineteen. He used to stand in the middle of a crowd without knowing until the last minute whether or not he’d board an approaching train, waiting for some kind of internal sign or act of the will to tell him what to do. “No matter what I won’t move from this spot,” he would sometimes swear to himself, then would jump on just as the doors were shutting. Other times he would tell himself severely, “I’ll take the next train,” and instead would find himself entering the one standing right before him. The very concept of chance had fascinated Gregory when he was younger, and through self-analysis and research he had tried to study it s workings in his own personality, though without any results, to be sure.

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

The Who Cares book launches this Friday at 5pm at the NY Art Book Fair. The whole fair looks interesting with Walid Raad, John Lurie, Silvia Kolbowski and others presenting new publications.

Last year, Creative Time invited me to be part of a series of discussions on the topic of politics in contemporary art. The series, organized by Doug Ashford, included a lot of great people, and now the edited transcripts of those talks are about to be published. Four related projects by artists are also due to open soon.

JG Ballard interviewed about his new novel Kingdom Come:

“Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There’s a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?” asks Ballard. In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts. “Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism,” he argues. “It’s a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter… The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation.”

The Times has a favorable review of David Friend’s recent study of the photography of September 11th, Watching the World Change. Besides being a well-written and impressively researched study of the images surrounding the event, I was happy to see that Friend foregrounds Wolfgang Staehle’s work, which I wrote about several years ago for Parachute magazine. Friend’s book is probably the first important study of 9/11 photography, and is a must for anyone interested in a critical and historical look at that day.

(I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to the audio interview posted with the review.)