The other night I sat on the porch with some friends and acquaintances discussing this and that. I had my iPad with me, and I was showing a friend what I had been doing with some old books. I explained that the process of getting the books on my iPad involved destroying the physical form [...]
Tag Archives: books
Cutting Up
My recent acquisitions of an iPad and a scanner have prompted me to think about literature in a new way. The iPad has made me revisit McLuhan’s assertion that “the medium is the message,” and my practices with the iPad and scanner seem to support just what he’s arguing.
A New Media Reading List
Since I am teaching our senior seminar on New Media this semester — the first time since 2005 — I have started to dig up some of my notes and handouts to prepare my soft machine. I have posted a reading list to keep track of important texts in new media and to remind myself [...]
Banned Books
The American Library Association announced its list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000. Among the contenders are such favorites as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and almost everything ever written by Judy Blume and Toni Morrison. Is it me, or is there an [...]
Kafka’s Challenge
I think we ought to read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us with a blow in the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and [...]
