Really feels to me like the “I skip the cutscenes” of book reading.
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Seeing a lot of brokeasses not on their grindset in the thread this morning
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to be fair to Magibook.ai they are pitching to people who are bad at reading that what to read good books. The sincerity and effectiveness is TBD but that’s a reasonable goal
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That recent thread of conversation over in It’s That GOT-damned-Y Time of the Year Once Again: The Forum Community GOTY Thread 2024 reminds me how much books are also about, as yeso put it,
I think the true strength of videogames is in the way they present place, atmosphere, duration, and a combination of visual, text, music, etc.
Edit that a bit and that describes one of the key points of attraction for books. It’s the texture, emphasis on text, that draws me to reading. It’s the way things go described or undescribed, the elaborateness or sparseness of description, the building and unbuilding of threads, and the feeling of potential consequence even at the level of word and phrase.
Atmosphere for a book doesn’t mean the same thing as a video game, but it aligns with things like tone, voice, and all the potential ways texts make literal meanings and figurative associations. Narrative and other elements matter too, but it’s the capacity to mull over and move through language that distinguishes the literary text as we discuss it from, say, the Wikipedia version of the text.
I am fine with the concept of a gloss. Breaking a text down can be an invaluable exercise, and I see nothing inherently wrong with reading others’ glosses. Heck, sometimes it offers scaffolding to get into the experience. (Compare: changing difficulties in a game.) What I react to instead is, first, the veer away from curiosity in the framing of hard as something to avoid and easy as something to enjoy. Sometimes we can read things without knowing everything that’s going on, and that’s OK.
More broadly, the use-case of a tool like this is most likely for students wanting to get by in a class they don’t particularly care about. The ad is a symptom of the way that plot knowledge is often incentivized over close textual engagement in class assessments, which in turn is a symptom of universities giving literature instructors massive courses (100+ students with TAs) and high schools giving teachers too much other stuff to do. I’d wager there isn’t a large audience going, “I would read The Great Gatsby but it’s too hard,” but there is an audience going, “If I have to read The Great Gatsby, I want it to be as painless as possible.” 30 years ago, they bought Cliff Notes; today, they might use this.
The rhetorical challenge is to get students who have been steeped in that environment to value reading. Can I convince them that “maximize your reading potential” and “avoid difficult language” are at odds with one another? Can I convince them of the value of the text? Can we start to talk about reading as an art, rather than a fifth-choice medium to slog through?
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yeah, well-said. as much as i love and respect “the written word” i am more pessimistic than ever of its “market value” and “relevance” in the years ahead
Look I guess I just identify with a Jude The Obscure kind of guy (the access to education part, none of that cousin stuff) and think of someone earnestly wanting to get into challenging reading and this is an on-ramp. Maybe being too sentimental idk
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i can sympathize with that sentiment, but i find it hard to believe that is the primary use case of the tech
@yeso and @Bonsai , the new york times posted a “read your way around chicago” article today:
- “Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser
- “Chicago Poems,” Carl Sandburg
- “Black Boy,” Richard Wright
- “The Man with the Golden Arm,” Nelson Algren
- “Annie Allen” and “Maud Martha,” Gwendolyn Brooks
- “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry
- “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland,” Bette Howland
- “The Adventures of Augie March,” Saul Bellow
- “Studs Terkel’s Chicago,” Studs Terkel
- “The House on Mango Street,” Sandra Cisneros
- “The Coast of Chicago,” Stuart Dybek
- “Last Summer on State Street,” Toya Wolfe
- “The Most Fun We Ever Had,” Claire Lombardo
- “O, Democracy!”, Kathleen Rooney
- “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” and “An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago,” Alex Kotlowitz
- “The Lazarus Project,” Aleksandar Hemon
- “The BreakBeat Poets” Vol. 1-4
- “My Favorite Thing is Monsters,” Emil Ferris
- “Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater,” Mark Larson
- “The Time-Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger
no opinion on the list, but did note some overlap with yeso’s list from october:
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and NLR wrote about Lamborghini earlier this year looks like I’m being copied
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I feel a visceral ickiness from that advertisement. However, if original material is properly preserved, supported and sign-posted no amount of post-creation alteration can completely obliterate the primary work. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Placebo) 1991 has been recreated/recontxtualized continuously since it was first shown. Because of its conceptual plasticity, I was able to work with a team of people to present this piece in 2013.
https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/works/untitled-placebo
But I can see where that line of thinking doesn’t as easily apply to books/writing. I feel like that has more to do with different kinds of evocation-potential inherent to individual works. Because intent only flows through the initial maker, we are all interpreting “roughed-up” versions of an original.
I think about how speed running communities (as gleaned mostly from GDQ) are communally clear and supportive of version history.
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this? Federico Perelmuter, In the Basement — Sidecar
had no idea aira was his literary executor, that’s cool. wish i could read him 
yes. Great job labeling Lamborghini as “steampunk” by the way Federico what the hell are you talking about
Since I can’t read Spanish I can only assume he’s right and you are in fact a giant steampunk fan
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this is literally why I decided not to post that article itt back when it was published
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Gatsby isn’t even that hard of a book! And literature isn’t merely a source of information to extract!
I would’ve grabbed the relevant Ursula K. Le Guin quote had I not realized the irony of doing that.
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A YouTuber I watch sometimes is deleting all his videos in service of some sort of large ARG taking place in Waco.
Anyway that got me to finally start this copy of House of Leaves I’ve had sitting around forever.
It’s cool so far, is it… Undertale?
Also I love my copy describing itself as “remastered” maybe I could’ve gotten the game of the year edition for cheaper.
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Turning a great beginning into a reddit made-up story slop.
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I read The House of Mango Street after yeso recommended it, I enjoyed it quite a bit and it is a nice short read. I chose to read the Spanish translation by Fernanda Melchor, but now I’m going to read it in English. There are many things I liked about the book and it feels easy to recommend because of how it presents itself as snippets of the author’s life. The writing flows very smoothly, and moments of happiness contrast with sections that were harder to read, because the author compellingly expresses sadness/desolation/anguish in certain scenes. It felt varied and rich despite its short length.
It was impossible not to read this book and reflect on my own trajectory as a immigrant to the US. I have a tendency to overshare, so I’ll try limit myself to saying that the book made me feel validated in important ways. Certain sections of the book (the last two especially) I wish I could hand out to everyone when they ask me if I prefer the US or my home country.
I’ll paste my favorite section (on this first read, at least) below, just because I feel like sharing it:
I like Alicia because once she gave me a little leather purse with the word GUADALAJARA stitched on it, which is home for Alicia, and one day she will go back there. But today she is listening to my sadness because I don’t have a house.
You live right here, 4006 Mango, Alicia says and points to the house I am ashamed of.
No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here. I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here. You have a home, Alicia, and one day you’ll go there, to a town you remember, but me I never had a house, not even a photograph … only one I dream of.
No, Alicia says. Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too.
Not me. Not until somebody makes it better.
Who’s going to do it? The mayor?
And the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud.
Who’s going to do it? Not the mayor"
If you find and replace the word “Mango Street” with “Dominican Republic” or “Santo Domingo”, and the word “Mayor” with “President”, it would mirror a very common type of conversation among emigrants from my country. I am sure that in the world there are many analogues to this. For it to be expressed in such a way, succinct but also universal, is incredible. It helped me realize that diaspora identity in general contains a sense of duty/responsibility that some people choose to turn away from, while others embrace.
Alicia telling her that she is Mango Street and will always be also felt reassuring in a way, as I put more and more distance between myself and my life back home I feel scared that I am losing my culture as if I were becoming a stranger. Though I had suspected it, it’s good to be assured that it doesn’t really work that way.
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Finished reading through the Complete Sarah Kane and thought it was pretty good. I think now as a decrepit old guy I’m less affected by the gruesome violence which seems at times to be the kind of an author in their 20s working in the 1990s Britain controversial art setting (dont know how fair it is to align the dramatic works of that time to contemporaneous YBA prominence is though just relating my frame of reference), which at times lands in like a yeah sure ok lady place, but beyond that the oblique descriptions of suffering and loneliness especially 4.48 Psychosis which I think is the best work, is really excellent and frightening.
Was expecting to read more Lamborghini but the books are taking a long time in the dang mail so I’ve been reading through Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur which is ok. It’s an attempt at collating and synthesizing a lot of esoteric “phenomenon” that ranges from Fortean to what was at time of publication in 1993 cutting edge UFOlogy and then as well with the darker sociological phenomenon like ritual murder conspiracy theories. So it’s sort of like a metacommentary on things from Fort through Vallee through Keel through Cooper and trying to find a through line more solid and descriptive than “weird conspiracy stuff”. So it’s interesting but suffers a bit by being pre-internet which means a lot of the value of this collation has been superseded (although a hardcover book is nicer than reading a computer monitor hunched over while developing gamer-posture) and it’s also information that’s unable to account for the subsequent unraveling of some of the stuff that’s treated more credibly than it turns out even an I Want To Believer like the author ought to treat it (UFO stuff, crop circles, etc being hoax-exposed eg)
And speaking of writers I used to like when I was young I picked up a copy of Blue Lantern Stories by Victor Pelevin bc I was wondering what’s going on with that guy nowadays. Looks like he’s still publishing a ton (and getting translated pretty consistently too). But wanted to revisit some of that earlier work to see if I’m still sympathetic and then if so why not look at the newer books too. Have read a number of the stories in the Blue Lantern collection before but some are new to me.
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what other treasures are you hiding yeso