When you read on Kindle, Amazon knows not only what books you like, but your favorite parts of those books, reports Kari Paul at The Guardian. This is not surprising, I suppose, and the extent to which it’s alarming depends greatly on your sense of privacy.
Your librarian for favorite bookseller (remember those) might know the same, though you’d have to tell them, rather than have them peeking over your shoulder as you read.
Amazon could really have helped out The Nothing in The Neverending Story or really screwed up The Princess Bride with all of its snooping.
I’ve had a couple of weird experiences with Goodreads. In one instance, I saw somebody reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara on the subway. As I was unfamiliar with the book but intrigued by the cover, I Googled the book.
The next time I opened Goodreads (an Amazon property), it recommended A Little Life to me. Couple of observations: it’s a little presumptuous for Goodreads to assume I’d want to read a book just because I looked it up. What if I’d Googled something bad like A Separate Peace? Second, had my fellow subway rider been reading on a Kindle, I would not have been able to become curious about what they were reading, but Amazon would know.
Another incident: I went to a meeting and left my phone on the table. The person I was meeting with said I would like Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin. I never looked up the book. My phone heard the recommendation and guess what Goodreads pushed on me the next time I opened the app?
To think, reading used to be a mostly private activity. I’d love a little more human interaction around it and a lot less electronic monitoring.
Very sad to read that George Steiner died at 90 years old. Perhaps more than any critic, Steiner was able to cover vast philosophical, literary and historic ground in concise and readable prose. His essays, particularly the four that make up In Bluebeard’s Castle simultaneously open up the world while filling the reader with lament about how little we know and how much there is to study in so little time.
Steiner approached the world with an artist’s sensibility in times increasingly dominated by the soft and hard sciences. He was a deep reader and a generous explicator. In a world adrift in the shallows, we needed George Steiner.
Gertrude Stein lived the very best of literary lives because she was both an artist and an appreciator. The writers, painters, sculptors and musicians that she nurtured made the world a better place, as did her own writing, particularly The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography.
I do wonder what she’d make of our own lost literary generation.
Classic Stage Company has a fantastic and advanced Frankenstein on stage right now, playing in repertory with a fresh adaptation of Dracula. The new telling if Frankenstein by writer Tristan Bernays presents the story of Frankenstein and his abandoned creature with just two actors one playing mostly the Creature (and sometimes Frankenstein) and the other a musician who represents a chorus of the books other characters, including the Blind Man, the child, and Frankenstein’s bride, Elizabeth.
The Bernay’s adapation really captures the origin the Mary Shelley’s story — it’s like being told a macabre tale in a darkened room on a winter night. The adaptation is a triumph.
In a two person show, the cast obviously has to be strong and versatile. CSC has access to the best talent so it’s no surprise that Stephanie Berry impresses with her range and stamina in the lead roles and Rob Morrison keeps the rhythm and atmosphere of the show as the chorus. Director Timothy Douglas ably leads a cast tasked with inspiring our imaginations.
I grew up with and have long practiced a kind of first amendment absolutism that seems now to be out of step with our times. It’s not that people don’t believe in the first amendment — polls show that most do and pretty much everyone I know would say they do — it’s more that people will no longer rank it as the highest value as issues of safety and social equality have taken new precedence in our discourse.
I first encountered this impulse directly in the 1990s, as part of an Albuquerque-based theatre company producing Ntzozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf with a multiracial cast, a decision that ran afoul the sensibilities of a local bookstore and led to protests. It didn’t even matter to those offended that Shange had explicitly blessed the production and casting.
We tend to view new attitudes about speech and whats constitutes offensive speech as a highly contemporary development, but this has been with us since the social awakenings of the 60s and was huge in the 90s. Along the way, the right of anybody to say whatever they want has eroded and the simple dismissal “you’re just complaining about the social consequences of speech,” doesn’t really suffice as an answer. Not if those social consequences are shutting people out of global conversations.
In an online literary forum where the topic of American Dirt was raised, I wrote: “We all have an absolute right to tell any story we want.”
The first response: “Hard disagree.”
This isn’t exactly an attack on the Constitution is how the argument tends to proceed. The Constitution only guarantees that the government will not stop something like American Dirt from being written and published. It makes no promises about people buying the book, agreeing to sell the book or not protesting the book’s existence. That’s all true. The right to write a book is equal to the right for somebody to protest the book’s existence. That’s the deal.
But I sill believe that the conviction that certain people shouldn’t even attempt to tell certain stories represents the beginning of an erosion of free speech. “A white woman shouldn’t have written American Dirt,” is just not an argument I can get behind even as “A white woman shouldn’t have written American Dirt badly,” is one I’m fine with.
We should argue about the quality of speech, not the existence of speech. The Freedom Forum Institute, which conducts an annual poll about first amendment attitudes shows that absolute support for free speech is slipping. In 2018, 23% of the poll respondents said that first amendment protections “go too far.” That number climbed to 29% in 2019. Can nearly a third of Americans really believe such nonsense?
35% of respondents believe that student journalists in public schools should need school administrator approval to write about controversial topics in student run publications. 27% believe that teachers should be allowed to punish students for the contents of their social media posts.
We allow and accept, by the way, that employers can fire people for what they post on social media or for having political bumper stickers on their cars. We also allow and accept that the massive corporate gatekeepers of the internet and the wider culture, like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter can promote or ban whatever speech they want and we say that this is proper because they are private even though corporate censorship may be a bigger threat than government censorship in contemporary America.
A decade ago, I remember the excitement around the impending publication of Hapworth, 16, 1924, a lost Glass-family novella that had been published in The New Yorker but never released as a book. The publisher was Orchises Press, a boutique outfit that had scrappily approached Salinger and obtained the author’s permission. This created some anxiety for avid readers as it would not be a large release and there would not be stacks of the new Salinger at the front tables of big box booksellers, or even at The Strand, where they could be easily obtained. I pre-ordered, I think, from Amazon and Powells and Tattered Cover.
Well, the book never happened. Our friend at Electric Literature report today that Salinger had wanted a limited, small press release which was thwarted by the concurrent ages of celebrity and Amazon.
In the meantime, those of us who cared were able to read the story in The New Yorker‘s digital archive. Nothing is truly lost anymore, except for the chance to own a beautifully designed and published physical Hapworth.
Meanwhile, reminds Electric Literature, we’ve been promised far more than this novella since Salinger’s death. Salinger’s later life biographers and contemporaries all say he continued to write long after he stopped publishing and went into seclusion.
J.D.’s son Matthew confirms a trove of unpublished materials, but not some of the specific novels that others have promised. He says we’ll get to see it, but he’s not promising anything soon.
Yesterday, Flatiron cancelled the remaining 35 appearances of a 40 city book tour for American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins. Cummins will return to the road later to conduct a series of town halls. What I find worrisome is that Flatiron cites threats made against the author and booksellers for motivating its decision. Publishers Weekly also reports that critics of the novel have received threats and been harassed as well.
It seems there are thugs and extremists on all sides of the issue and while I will not give them moral equivalence, I think that any threat of violence around the publication or sale of a book is just a short step away from the fanaticism that motivated the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015.
We should be having heated, passionate and sometimes even impolite fights over fiction, but violence should never enter into it.
I remember reading The Seagull in college, around the time when I’d delved head first into Sartre, Camus and Nietzsche and began nibbling around the edges of Dostoevsky. This is also when I’d begun studying playwriting and new professors exposed me to unfamiliar ideas. I entered the dramatic writing program at the University of New Mexico with Stephen Sondheim in my head as the master experimental writer. Soon, I was surrounded by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, David Mamet and Tom Stoppard and then Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch and Heiner Müller — just giving you a sense of where my head was at when I first cracked The Seagull. This was a huge period of awakening for a guy who really loved his Neil Simon and A.R. Gurney (and I still do!)
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/REX/Shutterstock (3827651a)
Portrait of anton chekhov, Russian author and playwright, 1900.
VARIOUS
I was so enamored of Konstantin’s passionate attempts to create new forms of theatre and storytelling and very much identified with his disappointment and despair at being ignored by the literary establishment, personified Boris Trigorin, who doesn’t even bother to cut the pages of the journals that publish Konstantin’s work. Also, I found Masha’s lovesick nihilism to be… quite profound.
So then I called a friend of mine, who was performing in a production of The Seagull at a college in the pacific northwest and talked about my take on the play and she had been cast as Masha in a production that, as was fashionable in the 90s, presented Konstantin as a sort of Kurt Cobain figure and she said to me, after listening patiently to my explication — “Don’t you think all of that is meant to be funny?”
Of course, she was right and I had to reread and reconsider The Seagull in that light and I also had to reread and reconsider everything that had led me to read so much earnest intent into the script in the first place.
It was a valuable lesson about how where I am in life so greatly affects my reading.
I just read The Spoon River Anthology for the first time. Somehow, it had escaped me. Though the preface assures me that Edgar Lee Masters is among the pioneers of psychological naturalism and a sort of bridge from Walt Whitman to T.S. Eliot and the great American modernists, I’d never been taught that.
I was struck, reading Spoon River by its tonal similarity to Lincoln on the Bardo by George Saunders. Both are tales told from the grave and both rely on, as Masters put it, the idea that we’ll never know truth until the dead can speak for themselves. The main difference in style is that Bardo is a fully realized novel while Spoon River is a collection of related poems, tied by numerous narrative threads but less unified, even than Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson also owes Masters a debt).
To me the most significant difference between Spoon River and Bardo is the treatment of Abraham Lincoln. Saunders simultaneously humanizes and lionizes Lincoln, in a manner very much in step with modern political thought. Masters, living and writing closer to the Civil War and a seeming pacifist (he criticizes U.S. military adventurism in the Philippines in the book and seems very much to believe that most wars are engineered by moneyed interests at the expense of everyone else) is highly critical of Lincoln. Already, in the early part of the 20th century and more than five decades removed from the end of the Civil War, Masters reveals himself as, at best, a political crank with his criticisms of Lincoln.
In many ways, Bardo is an answer to Spoon River and a corrective.
Even in the age of the Internet, literature remains our longest running an most vital conversation.
“Looking Through the Glass” is a short play I wrote, based on Alice in Wonderland, originally for a 24-hour play festival for the Grex Group at the Player’s Theatre in Greenwich Village. It was later performed, with one member of the original cast, at a library reading series in Harlem and was also staged as part of the show Curious Conversations by the Eclectic Theatre Company of Los Angeles.
Download a copy of this easy-to-stage, ten minute play below:
