An Imperfect World: eBooks and Digitalization

Word on Wall street is that eBooks are catching on. They took the lion's share of holiday sales at all the big chains--Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and even the oh-jeezus-just-put-it-out-of-its-misery Borders--and are fast-outpacing print books in terms of sales. With the growth of ebooks, now with apps coming to the iPad and other reading devices, some have said that print books may be all-out replaced with ebooks.

Now, while I consider myself somewhat of a neo-Luddite (not all technological advances are necessary and beneficial, and may even be our undoing as a species), I'm not totally against ebooks after looking at the facts. If they're more convenient to voracious readers, that's great. If it gets more people reading books (as I'm hoping to write some myself) then I'm all for it. If it enables more talented writers to get their work out there without the annoying and greedy middleman of Big Publishing (which has worked for some already), then awesome! I even considered opening an account at a bank that was offering a free Kindle if you opened an account with them, just to get the Kindle. For free.

But if the ebook were to replace paper books....well, I think we're in trouble. Because if even books were no longer printed on paper, what need would be for there to be anything else?

Obviously, there is the advantage of tangibility. There's no other feeling like the weight of a book in your hand. And several people, including myself, are reluctant to give up the intricacies of book design and touchable existence for more convenience and a cheaper price. I also pick up a book or magazine to escape the glare of a screen, whether it's from my computer or television. But there are some disadvantages to ebooks--and several other forms of digital technology--that are rarely discussed.

There are several implications to a complete and systematic digital conversion. For one, a digital world ties us to our phones, our e-readers, and our laptops; i.e. a screen. Our senses become reduced to the simple mechanisms of sight and sound. While virtual reality technology could change that, it still doesn't excuse the fact that poeple are turning away from the world right in front of them in favor of one that is purely of their invention. Another concern is people's vulnerability to identity fraud. If everyone is paying for their entertainment and other products online, they are exposing themselves to cyber- and identity-thieves who could hack into their accounts or even their computers and seriously fuck things up. Another vulnerability entailed with the reduction of payments to debit and credit is economic, especially with credit cards. The ease and illusion of relative safety in paying with credit as opposed to from one's bank account can tempt some people to spend more on things they can't afford, providing a boon for credit card companies. And this may sound conspiratorial, but electronic purchases are recorded, and therefore traceable, exposing people in corrupt areas to trouble just because the government doesn't like their buying habits. While the Internet is free now, in a completely digitalized world, the people may be under even more control than they even know. (In fact, the Internet, or parts of it, are already going to start making you pay)

While a digital world can open up doors for some people (human rights activists among them), it's important to remember that not everyone can afford the devices to access this world, thus locking them out. Even now, when a lot of jobs are available to apply for online, people who cannot afford a computer, internet access, or a safe haven in which to access the internet are at an even greater disadvantage. Libraries and community centers are important in that they remove this disadvantage from the most vulnerable. Even if they do land a job, it could be one that pays paltry wages, not enough to afford them access to the digital world. That's the problem with accepting a middle-class norm, as it marginalizes the experiences of people who can't afford the latest smart phone or e-reader. Books may be expensive, but at the library they will always be free. Sony has configured a lending program for select libraries, in which people could borrow e-readers, but ideas like this are still very much in their infancy, so their success or lack thereof has yet to be determined. The internet can be liberating, but when one relies on internet only, it can also be a form of oppression, keeping the impoverished down.

The potentially worst--and most overlooked--problem is the implications of e-waste. While digital products technically don't exist in the physical world, the platforms that make these products possible very much do exist. A lot of metals and other materials go into laptops and e-readers, using up resources and energy. And since many users of this technology just throw out their old and broken devices, e-waste piles up, returning the toxins to the earth of third-world countries--and counties. Recycling programs and more energy-efficient, environmentally-friendly products have gained momentum in the tech industry, but it's only a matter of time before the metals and other raw materials begin to dwindle, or the workers in the mines and factories start demanding fair wages, thus increasing the cost of electronics and making them even less accessible. What will happen to a digital world if the gates to that world grow rusty and are forced to shutter?

It's a good sign that people in the publishing and tech industries have recognized some of these problems, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, in spite of the numerous times they have enraged and frustrated me over the years. I can only hope that the dark, decaying post-apocalyptic world of my nightmares does not in fact come true.

"Forever" isn't So Long

I'm briefly taking a break from the postmodernism series to discuss other stuff. Today I'll be reviewing Judy Blume's "Forever", a YA novel that was quite controversial in its day, and has been on the Banned Books list for some time.

A couple of weeks ago, I had gone to the Borders that was closing in Boston's Back Bay to buy some books for cheap. I wound up spending $65 (and charging it on my credit card, since I'm kinda cash-strapped at that moment), but on the receipt it says I saved $16.00. So I guess that counts for something.

One of the books I bought was one I'd been dying to read for some time, just for kicks: Judy Blume's "Forever," a novel about first love and the first time ... and nobody dies. (SPOLIER ALERT: somebody does try to kill himself, and a girl gets pregnant, but neither of these characters are the lovers at the heart of the story) Perhaps my expectations were too high for a YA novel, but I was ... disappointed. (Full disclosure: I read "Are You there God? It's Me, Margaret" at an age-appropriate time, and I didn't really enjoy it, though I liked the Fudge books)

The narrator and protagonist, Katherine, was supposed to be 17, but her overly simplistic and erratic narration resembled more like a 13-year-old's journal. The focus on her relationship with Michael was too narrow, like Judy Blume had decided to write a story about teenagers having responsible sex and didn't think that much more about plot and characterization. As if nobody cared about anything else other than sex and relationships...other interests, like skiing and tennis, were mentioned, but only served as plot devices.

Of course, this book is probably meant for 13 (possibly 14) year-olds, or perhaps my vocabulary is too sophisticated for the average YA reader, but I don't think a 16 year-old (when parents would like to think is a more realistic age to be interested in actually having sex) would be all that challenged by the writing. The characters were also cartoonish, exhibiting cliched, predictable, and unbelievably mish-mashed traits. (Examples: Katherine is the responsible, role-model "everygirl", her bff is yang to her yin, a character is a "genius" and is also fat and promiscuous, Katharine's mom can eat as much as she wants and not "get fat" ...le sigh) This just touches the surface of what bugged me about this book. Was I expecting too much to think that the characters would be more complex and the writing/story structure...better?

Yet, the depiction of the actual sex was very realistic, not glossing over the uncomfortable parts (albeit using euphemistic language and other techniques to avoid explicitly graphic content...though the reader definitely knows what she's talking about). Katharine's first time more closely resembled my own than anything else that I'd seen or read in popular culture. Of course, I still giggled at the use of the words "penis" and "vagina" like a 10-year-old in health class. But I'm just immature like that. If I knew a 13-year-old who was interested in learning more about sex, I might give her this book, if she wanted a fictional story. But then again, I don't want to insult her intelligence.

I do admire Judy Blume for the then-taboo subject matter she tackled in her fiction, and giving the younger demographic memorable characters that today's generation of young readers still read. But as an immature, hyper-literate adult, I perhaps came across "Forever" too late to determine whether it's really any good for this generation. I give it three out of five stars, for effort and pluck.

Critical Response Archive: Wide Sargasso Sea

Some postmodernist literature make a new spin on an old story, telling it from a new perspective, one that was likely ignored or marginalized in the original tale. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys shows the perspective of the character that was most marginalized in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: Bertha Mason, the mad wife of Mr. Rochester. In Jane Eyre, Bertha was presented as a monster: dark, unkempt, and insidiously jealous of Jane. Jean Rhys humanizes the woman who was described as a beast, looking through her eyes, showing her hopes and her fears, and revealing her inner torment that led her to despairing madness. Through this portrayal, Rhys even questions the perception of “madness” and how it had come about. The fragmented structure of the story, in which bare snippets of various moments in her life are described, reflects the consciousness of the narrator, who for the most part is Bertha—though in Rhys’ story her real name is her middle name, Antoinette. However, Wide Sargasso Sea is not a retelling of Jane Eyre—hardly any of the characters or events in the novel are present, excepting Mr. Rochester and Antoinette—but a new story altogether, showing the progression of Antoinette’s mental breakdown.

Wide Sargasso Sea is hardly a conventional tale: two perspectives are shown, neither of which tell the complete story, and the timing of the events that take place are vague, blurring the separation between past and present. As a more modern novel than the story that inspired it, Wide Sargasso Sea stands more as a critique of colonial mores and a challenge to the reverence of old but certainly not unprejudiced works. Rhys clearly means no disrespect towards the original material: after all, Jane Eyre was the inspiration behind the whole novel; but she does bring to light the racism present in the story’s characters, as Mr. Rochester (who is unnamed in the novel) views the blackness of his wife as ugliness. But even Bertha holds some racist beliefs towards her black fellows, and she is impulsive to a fault, so Rhys does not paint her as a perfect innocent in light of the events that brought tragedy to her life. Rhys also sheds light on the aspects of Mr. Rochester’s personality that must have made some readers of Jane Eyre (such as myself) pause and wonder, “What does Jane see in him?” such as his temper and destructive selfishness. Though once again, even more inexplicably, we see Bertha falling dangerously in love with him. The reader knows the story won’t end well for Antoinette, but one can’t help but hope with Christophine, Antoinette’s caretaker since childhood, that she’ll wake up and escape her fate.

Jean Rhys does not tell the whole story leaving some interpretation up to the reader, such as whether Antoinette was really mad, or whether the madness was induced by the distress she experienced while she was with Mr. Rochester. With this fragmented narrative, Rhys suggests that the reader may take both Antoinette and Mr. Rochester’s stories, both full of regret and despair, with a grain of salt. She has presented two sides to the story to tell a more complete tale, while reminding us who has the power and privilege, and who is at a disadvantage.

Critical Response Archive: Lost in the Funhouse

Most of the stories in John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse add an entirely new dimension to storytelling, removing both reader and author from the action while simultaneously placing them right in the midst of the storytelling process. For instance, the first story, “Frame Tale,” a Möbius strip of sorts, presents a recurring theme in the series (as Barth calls the book in the Author’s Note), that there is in fact no end. Another theme that links the stories together is the exposure of the actual construction of the story, with few trappings of illusion.



In the Author’s Note given at the opening of the book, he lists the different ways in which the various stories can be enjoyed, not just in print, but also in live and recorded voice. Several of the stories recommended for audio recordings, such as “Glossolalia” and “Echo” have a strong narrative voice that recalls the oral traditions of myths and folk tales: an element that is also present in Robert Coover’s work. But while the stories of Lost in the Funhouse contain a lot of the marks of postmodern work that I’ve come to identify as such, all address the process of telling of the story. Barth removes himself from it by inserting a version of himself (the “author”) into the story, using the same characters for several stories, and revisits the same story—recollecting the Iliad—twice, with two different perspectives: one from one of the epic’s major players, and the other on a lowly minstrel attempting to tell a version of the tale. Even the more “traditional” stories in the series, like “Ambrose His Mark” and “Water-Message,” have some unconventional traits that can classify them as postmodern: in addition to a possible connection between the stories, as the same names for the same characters and a similar setting are set up, both blur the distinction between true and untrue (either exaggerated or fantasized) events taking place in the story.

Each story also begins and ends by addressing itself, or whatever the narrator is speaking of, echoing the initial Mobius strip story in the beginning. Even in third person, the narrator, i.e. the “author”—or perhaps Barth himself—is a strong presence in the story, never invisible, as in traditional fiction. “Lost in the Funhouse” most prominently features these qualities, as Barth steps out of the narrative to examine narrative structure, wax philosophic, and create a fantasy within the narrative. Like a funhouse, the stories weave in and out from existing purely within the reality constructed in that story, to acknowledging and analyzing its construction, or else the construction of a reality within that reality. “Menelaiad” presents this concept visually, with quotations within quotations, as the narrator tells a story about telling a story about telling a story recalling possibly exaggerated actions of his past adventures. Similarly, “Life-Story” is a multi-layered narrative in which a writer is trying to tell the story of a writer who feels like he is but a character in a story and writing a story about a writer who feels like he is but a character in a story, etc., though one can get lost within the multiple dimensions of the narrative. The title Lost in the Funhouse applies not just to the short story that bears the name, but also the entire series, with their labyrinthine and multilayered structure.

Critical Response Archive: Breakfast Of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s first novel after a lengthy slump following one of his more famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five, definitely comes off as somewhat scatterbrained, yet it is more cohesive than some other novels I have read, like Naked Lunch. Breakfast of Champions blends all of the elements of postmodernism together, combining the critique of highbrow literary criticism and tangential self-indulgence of Pale Fire’s narrative and narrator with the obscene absurdity of Naked Lunch, meanwhile adding social commentary, philosophical musings, and self-self-referencing to the postmodern mix. The result is a marriage of highbrow and lowbrow culture, a trademark of many of the postmodern novels that followed. And once again the depressing prose is spiced with satire, easing the pain of swallowing the determinist analysis on our doomed reality. Upon further research behind the writing of Breakfast of Champions, I found that Kilgore Trout and other characters in the novel also appear in Vonnegut’s other novels. I wish now to read some of Vonnegut’s other work in my own spare time so that I can see how Breakfast of Champions fits into his multiverse.

Vonnegut has also blurred the concept of reality within the story, though with references to himself and the real world, he seems to be questioning the reality of our own world, in which he and the reader exist, as well. Vonnegut doesn’t just critique the nature of a story and its construction, but also the construction of the reality in which we live. Reality in Breakfast of Champions is distorted twofold, since Vonnegut wrote the story as an author of his own creation. His “author” presents and makes observations of the world around him (which rather closely resembles our own) in ways that the intended audience had probably never thought of before, like viewing the European explorers as “sea pirates.” Every now and then there are points at which the “author,” Philboyd Stodge, admits to taking some elements of his own life and putting them into the novel, and it’s clear from the preface (and knowing of Vonnegut’s creative process in writing this novel) that parts of Vonnegut’s own life and self are a part of the novel, as well.

Breakfast of Champions, while befuddling and thought-provoking in its own right, is more accessible than the lofty prose of Pale Fire, the disconnectedness of Naked Lunch, and the experimentalism of Pricksongs and Descants. Though this is the only Vonnegut that I’ve read, I think I can gather that he was one of the first mass-postmodern writers, who—while he did include themes that were relevant to avid readers and writers—he also spoke to the “common” reader. He questions both the nature of literature and reality itself.

Critical Response Archive: Pricksongs and Descants

Reading Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants was like going through a primer in postmodernism, as each of the stories showcased an aspect of what had become associated with postmodern literature. There were stories that gave old ones a spin, stories that called attention to their existence as stories, boundaries between what is real and imagined blurred, pop cultural phenomena twisted into grotesque acts of human malice, and the notion of unilateral space-time cast into the wind. Each story in Pricksongs and Descants challenged the notion of what constitutes a short story and the conventional structure of such. Some broke conventions with much success, while others fell far short, or else distracted me with the problematic representation of the female characters.

I most enjoyed the style of the stories “Morris In Chains,” “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” and “The Gingerbread House,” which broke the rules in interesting and delightfully bizarre ways. In “Gingerbread House” and “J’s Marriage”, old stories are told from another character’s perspective (though “Gingerbread House” stays rather true to old-fashioned storytelling form), making them new and original. In “Panel Game,” a game show becomes a grotesque act showcasing humiliation and the basest and selfish instincts of human nature, eerily predicting the inception of “reality” television thirty years early. In fact, many of Coover’s stories present a distorted and/or monstrous version of reality, revealing the darkness of humanity. “A Pedestrian Accident,” “The Wayfarer,” and “The Leper’s Helix” are others that have this theme up front-and-center.

Other stories, I did not enjoy so much. “The Magic Poker” jumped from one reality to another much too quickly and abruptly to my taste, and the stories in “The Sentient Lens,” static and disconnected, though the language was quite intricate and beautiful. “Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl” was the least innovative and interesting, the only story that actually bored me halfway through. The women in these stories (and a few others) were reduced mainly to their bodies, described very sensually by the onlooking narrator (whether they were a part of the action or not), but their own thoughts and motivations were withheld from the reader. Many of the female characters also experience either sex, death, or both, real or imagined, further reducing them to objects and literary devices. This did not hold entirely true to the male characters. And that is what is most bothersome about it. So, while much of Coover’s fiction was progressive for the time, his portrayal of women definitely was not.

One thing that I had not come across in any other fiction thus far was the helpless victimhood of many of the characters. In stories like “A Pedestrian Accident,” “Morris In Chains,” “Panel Game,” and “The Marker,” we learn very little about the main characters themselves, but are compelled to sympathize with them. They were mere pawns of theme and plot, somehow knowing they were trapped and could do nothing, but uncertain why. The storyteller thus becomes a cruel and sadistic god, putting his creations through humiliation and torture for the benefit of the narrative. This device brings the motivations and purpose of fiction to the foreground, placing all literary traditions in the background. It’s a cool concept that works in the aforementioned “Panel Game” and “A Pedestrian Accident,” not so much in “The Marker.” While his work is not perfectly progressive, Coover certainly proved himself to be one of the great spearheaders of the postmodern movement early in his career with these stories.

Critical Response Archive: Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch is one of those novels that may or may not withstand the test of time. Though it is one of the most acclaimed and influential novels of the last century, it did not have a very great impact on me personally. It’s described as “satire,” but I found it less humorous and more absurd. The vulgarity for me was also too much, and I found many of the depictions of homosexuals and foreigners to be problematic. It could be a matter of personal taste, but I did not find much that was so groundbreaking at the time. Certainly there was plenty of obscenity, but Kerouac and Ginsberg got there first. Such obscenity is so prominent in today’s culture that one can doubt if Naked Lunch has as much of an impact now as it did then.

What I did find interesting were the strange worlds that the narrator found himself in. However, I found it frustrating that I couldn’t really ground myself in any specific type of world. I chalk this up to the structure of the novel, which doesn’t really tell an overarching story, but several little stories loosely strung together with a character whose identity is multifaceted and unknown. One couldn’t know who was the narrator in sections that utilized the third person, and the nature of the narrator’s reality is constantly called into question, as he is always fucked up on some drug and hardly a reliable source about the reality of the world surrounding him. Cool images were conjured up by the artful language, but they were fleeting, lost in the murky waters of confusion. The proliferation of slang and made-up words also made the narratives difficult to follow, and one can definitely make an accurate guess about its age even without knowing about the Beat generation. However, Naked Lunch succeeded in constructing the consciousness of a drug junkie: a consciousness most of us are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. For this, I commend Burroughs and his prose.