Archive for » February, 2009 «
The New York Times has talked about digital reading before and they’re doing it again. Despite the different scenario, a toddler being able to differentiate between a book and the screen and the impact each may have, the question is still the same: is online reading still reading?
Listen, people. Times they are a-changing. You’re reading this right now, aren’t you? Does that mean you’re not really reading? Are we getting metaphysical with that definition? Because it seems to be coming close to that. The first entry definition of “read” on dictionary.com is “to look at carefully so as to understand the meaning of.” The examples given to further the definition mention something printed, but those are just examples. The definition doesn’t officially include only that a book bound and printed is the only form of actually reading.
I’m not keen on the whole digital reading, really (despite the two blogs I have, I know). Staring at a screen for extended periods of time is much more straining on my eyes than staring at a book. But how can the benefits of digital reading be discounted? The Amazon Kindle, for example, can store a thousand books. How convenient is that for traveling? Does it mean that the guy next to you is “legitimately” reading the same book because he has the printed version and you’re just fiddling with technology? Of course not. The words are the same. The story is the same. The medium is just different. It doesn’t make it any lesser than the other.
Books, in many forms, have been around for thousands of years. I doubt the e-book is going to make them go away any time soon. I posted somewhere on this blog the statistics of people who like printed books versus digitial media and the former still greatly outweighs the latter. But it doesn’t make the latter not reading.
No, I don’t think a Kindle will ever replace the feeling of curling up with a good book. It’s just not the same. But let’s open our eyes to our changing literary environment, ok? To say reading one book on a screen isn’t really reading and reading the same thing in print is is just idiotic. They both say the same thing. For a generation that’s grown (and growing) up with iPods and cell phones, they can be and are the same thing. People act as if libraries and book stores are going to become extinct within the next week. Get a grip.
Reading’s reading and in a society where literacy rates and testing scores are steadily declining (or not getting better compared to our ridiculously low test scores), beggars can’t really be choosers, can they? So long as they’re reading, their brains are being stimulated. Let’s go on from there.
I know I’m not alone when I say I’m a cube monkey, or meercat might be the better definition, because you know you can’t help but compare the people who pop up out of their cubes to some form of gopher-like wildlife popping up out of its hole. At least the gopher doesn’t call up their co-worker who’s in the next cube.
I’m telling you, we aren’t too far away from becoming the humans in Wall-E who are so dependent on their mobile chairs that they flop around like upside down turtles if they’re knocked off. I answer the phone of two people who sit in in joining cubes with only a little cube wall to separate them. When one of their in-house calls defaults to me, I can’t see who’s calling (even though I rarely look anyway). When I answered one of their calls today, it was one calling the other. They sit all of five feet apart.
Can someone please explain the logic of this? When you can stand up and talk over the wall to the person you’re calling, why the deuce would you call them? Even when we were in the old office with quarter cubes and you didn’t even have to lean back to see each other, people on either side of me would call each other and I could hear the entire conversation. In surround sound.
I don’t get this. I can understand the convenience, especially if you have an office like ours now where it’s a five minute walk to the other side of the building, but still. Is it really necessary to call your cube neighbor when you’re voice is echoing in their own receiver?
We are destined to be slugs, I’m telling you. Our asses will meld to our chairs and we will be one with the rolly wheels. My legs would atrophy if I sat too long at my desk. I get up for the littlest things. And I have never called my cube neighbor, especially when I can just talk over the wall. From my chair. I mean, come on.
Narnia . . . where horses talk and hermits like company, where evil men turn into donkeys, where boys go into battle . . . and where the adventure begins.
During the Golden Age of Narnia, when Peter is High King, a boy named Shasta discovers he is not the son of Arsheesh, the Calormene fisherman, and decides to run far away to the North – to Narnia. When he is mistaken for another runaway, Shasta is led to discover who he really is and even finds his real father.
This is my favorite book in the series so far. I loved the imagery and the story that’s being told here and the will that this this weak little boy (because that’s what he really is) does have. I can picture almost an Egyptian-like feel to the world that Shasta’s in, and I really don’t think that’s unintentional.
As someone that’s as nonreligious as they come, even I picked up on the Moses in the reeds homage this story paid. I knew going in that CS Lewis had some heavy Christian themes in his Narnia series. I guess it goes right along with write what you know, right? At least he did something different with it. He was given an image to color and it looked like one that everyone else had. He just used different crayons.
I would have liked to have seen some more of Bree, though. He seemed to have a pretty big conflict towards the end of the story, with his dignity and walking back into his land a relative stranger. The story certainly hops around enough that that could have been a possibility to have in there instead of just a passing mention of what he did with his life at the very end. That part just seemed to be left hanging and, really, it was the only part that left me a little unfulfilled.
I liked the integration of the original children (well, the LWW children, anyway) into this very different tale. Being someone that’s pretty unfamiliar with The Chronicles of Narnia, I like how they’re used as sort of fishing wire to string the stories together, even at the very end of The Magician’s Nephew (although that would be only if you were even remotely familiar with LWW).
Overall, an excellent book and I can’t wait to keep plowing through the series.
At this point it’s not so much editing but total rewriting. I’m at half the pages in the second draft than I was in the first and I’m deleting entire chapters instead of just adding bits and pieces or tweaking. This is what happens when you realize as you read back over your work that the timing of your story is all wrong and needs to be shifted. It’s a lot easier to shift, say, Legos, than it is to shift a storyline. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing Sabina much more into the story than she was (and she’s the MC, yeah, I know), making more events current than passive, extending the timeline so the relationships can be substantiated and moving the entire story back six months so the ending coincides with a major holiday in the kingdom.
I’m realizing, though, that I’m having some trouble with the characters’ interactions, especially the relationship development. I’m finding it hard to build it up slowly (the romantic relationships) and have the nuances be subtle, or what I see as subtle, like it would be in real life. But Ketin, Mic, Cab, Talem and Pyle are coming into their own as characters. I’m struggling a little bit with Lania. She showed me an awesome part of herself at the beginning of the story but how she’s acting now doesn’t really fit that first part. She could be screwing with me or she could be saying I’m this and that. I have no idea. She’s a difficult one. Bettis isn’t really even in the picture yet but I’m thinking she will be, just not as her normal self.
I can’t remember if I mentioned these characters (other than Sabina and Cab) in prior posts but they’re all sort of central to the Diamond Crier plot. Sabina’s the MC, Mic’s her love interest (subtle love interest), Cab and Lania come in a pretty close second, Ketin is the catalyst and Pyle and Bettis are acting as sort of fillers but their changes in character will be needed for the plot. There’s also Fash, Barloh, Gorvish, Mein, Torle and Jaen (not to mention Jeviar and his wife, Lana) but I don’t need to get into them right now. They’re a lot easier for me to work with.
I could have sworn I posted a couple pictures of myself on here but I can’t seem to find them. They would have been around August or September but I’m not seeing them, from my trip to New Jersey to the MonserMania horror convention. Eh, I’m tired. I could very well be missing them. But I’m posting another picture of myself because I’ve done something pretty drastic.
My hair’s been growing out for a few years. After having it so short for so many years, I just wanted something different. Then it started to take on a life of its own and I could no longer control the frizz or the breakage or the fact that I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So I decided to cut it. Now that picture is a little disingenuous. Since my hair’s curly, even wet as in that picture, it’s not showing as long as it actually was, probably another 3 or 4 inches. It easily came down to the bottom of that design on my shirt. This is what it looks like now.
In all it’s MySpace angle glory. Yes, those curls are natural and if I do say so myself, they’re a hell of a lot nicer looking when they’re short. What is lacking on my head is waiting in a bag to be shipped to the Locks of Love organization, a non-profit charity organization that makes wigs from donated hair for children who’ve lost theirs to disease or medical treatment. I don’t know what kind of processing the hair goes through but those are really nice looking wigs. Hopefully they’ll have better luck getting the frizz out of my hair.
So if you have at least eight to ten inches and are jonsing for a change, keep Locks of Love in mind when you decide to hack it off.
Self-censorship can be a beneficial thing. It’ll keep you from looking like an ass at inopportune moments and pretty much keep your dignity intact. But when it comes to school librarians self-censoring for the sake of the children, we have a completely different issue.
Especially in this economy, I can understand walking on egg shells and playing nice with the school board when they “highly recommend” that a book not get bought for their library because a job is better than no job. But the ones that do it out of fear of backlash from the parents or even because they themselves don’t agree with the text is a censoring best left to their own children.
In a poll conducted by the School Library Journal, a sampling of school librarians of all school levels from all over the country were anonymously polled about their censoring. That poll shows, among other things, that school librarians won’t shelve a book due to the potential threat from parents, this overwhelmingly over any kind of reaction from the administration. Now what does that say? That parents need to keep parenting to their own children maybe?
It’s bad enough when parents come out and officially challenge a book, or succeed in getting a book officially banned (honestly, that have to know that it has the adverse effect on their intentions) but when librarians refuse to even let the book out in the open for fear of repercussion is hitting a little below the belt. I’m the only one that should be dictating what my child can and can not read, not some worm with nothing better to do than organize a rally to get a perfectly good book banned because she doesn’t like the word scrotum in it. It’s not like it was on every page. It was said once. Ooo!
Narnia . . . the land beyond the wardrobe, the secret country known only to Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy . . . the place where the adventure begins.
Lucy is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor’s mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund and then Peter and Susan discover the Magic and meet Aslan, the Great Lion, for themselves. In the blink of an eye, their lives are changed forever.
You know, I can’t help but question whether a book like this would be published today. There’s a lot of telling, not so much showing, a lot of action is skimmed over and it’s very obviously a religious allegory (not that that would make it ineligible for publication). I couldn’t help but think that as I read it but at the same time I couldn’t help but think just how magical the story actually is.
Compare the circumstances to other works now and you don’t have all that much that is original but then, back in 1950, this was the epitome of original. There was nothing else like this story except for facetious fairy tales that carried very little depth. This was the basis for portals and other worlds and magical creatures that authors today either consciously or subconsciously pull from for their own stories. So no, it’s not original today but it is the very reason it’s not original today, because it was so original and magical then that it was bound to spurn derivatives.
