After the vertigo-inducing price drops in the Kindle and Nook a month ago, the other ebook reader producers have unveiled their new lines and strategies (though in some cases, as with the Cool-Er Reader, the strategy is to go out of business). First the Kobo Reader, which is newly released and sold in Borders and elsewhere, is on sale for $129. That ebook reader is a lot like the old Sony Pocket Edition: no connectivity, no keyboard or touchscreen, eink screen. Borders is also selling the hideous Libre Pro ereader for $100, but it has an LCD screen and not eInk, and looks like it was hammered together in someone's high school shop class. Bleh.

Meanwhile, Sony is showing off its new Pocket, Touch and Daily Editions. Rather than competing in the race to the bottom, Sony is concentrating on quality, and the new readers are slimmer and lighter than the Kindle or Nook, and all have a new touchscreen that's supposed to be a big improvement over Sony's old, glare-ridden one. The touch screen also means that now the Sony Pocket edition is capable of annotation and highlighting, like its bigger brothers. However, still only the Daily Edition has connectivity, through 3G and WiFi, which is a strange decision considering that they're still selling it for $299, an absurd price compared to the $139 wifi Kindle/$189 3G Kindle and $150 wifi Nook/$199 3G Nook. The Touch Edition is now $229 and the Pocket Edition is now $179. Sony will also be coming out with iOS and Android apps to read books from their ebook store, ala the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo apps.

However, I think most people reporting on these new Sonys are burying the lede. The one feature I'm most excited about? According to the press release the new readers have translation dictionaries. Meaning, I can read a book in Spanish, highlight a word, and get the definition in English. Nobody else has this feature. Even on the iPad, where it would seem obvious, it doesn't exist. In iBooks you can't even look up a word in a foreign language and get a definition in that language; only an English dictionary is available, even if you've localized your device to another language.

This is a huge feature for anyone learning or practicing a second language. Indeed, one of the reasons I often resist picking up a book in Spanish is because I know I'll have to read the book in front of a computer so I can look up the handful of words on each page that are unfamiliar to me (or worse, cumbersomely thumb through a translation dictionary). With the new Sonys, I wouldn't have that problem -- and I know the translation dictionaries will work on the subway or wherever else I might be without connectivity, because two of the readers don't have connectivity at all. Brilliant! This would completely change the way I read books in my second language, and would be a mammoth boon to the hordes of people learning foreign languages, including English, if only Sony would have the presence of mind to market to them directly. (One assumes that they'll do this at least in their native Japan, where English is the most popular second language class in schools--which shows how big the market is in the educational sector alone.)

In short, this one feature, which most news organs aren't even reporting on, is the one thing that might make me give away my current ebook reader and buy a new one. It's certainly more important to me than wireless connectivity, which I do just fine without. In fact, there are only two reasons I read a book on my iPad rather than on my Sony Reader; one is the iPad has a book available (usually through the Kindle app) that isn't available from Sony, and two is that I read non-fiction on the iPad because I can highlight and annotate there. The new Sony Pocket Edition, however, solves this second problem handily. As for the first; well, I still dream of a day when all books are available as non-DRM'd ePub editions that can be read on any reader.

What? I can dream, can't I?

Ed Champion and myself will be hosting a new speculative fiction reading series/carnaval of crazyness called the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza. First event:

September 26th, 2010
at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
With: Charles Yu and Brian Francis Slattery
Poetry by Jonathan Berger
Music! Comedy! Mayhem!

The idea is really to create a reading event that is so much fun people will want to come even if they've never heard of the readers in question, and to that end the event will be as much of a show and a performance as simple readings.

Charles Yu is the author of Third Class Superhero and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and was one of the National Book Foundations 5 Under 35 in 2007. He wrote a book with a time machine that runs on regret.

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues and Liberation and is one of my favorite writers as well as a musician who incorporates musical performance into his readings.

Jonathan Berger is a longtime, New York humorous poet who reads over music.

For more information and laughs, see the official web site.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
Constitution of the United States, First Amendment

I'm angry. Furious. My rage is a white fire deep in my chest that I can't let cool because I fear that if I do I will just start sobbing and I won't be able to stop. It appears to me, frankly, that the world has finally tipped over something and gone completely insane. I don't want to go outside because I fear that if I see another person the rage will boil up and I will start screaming. I don't know how to look another human being in the eyes right now without wondering if they are one of the far too many who think it's okay to protest the faith of other Americans and try to stop them from building houses of worship. I fear that if i started talking to someone on the street about this, and they said the wrong thing, the flames might rise up and jet from out of my mouth, burning them to ash. I am not safe to be near at the moment.

"If I could conceive that the general government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded, that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution."
George Washington

What is a Convention?

Allow me to describe a conception of art based around the twin poles of convention and novelty (which I will resist calling Convention and Novelty, because I am not French). A convention is simply a norm or collection of norms, and all art exists within certain conventions. In the visual arts, applying paint with a brush is a convention of method, and a landscape is a convention of genre, containing its own, respective conventions that can differ from time to time and place to place, as illustrated by the clear differences between traditional East Asian landscape paintings and traditional European ones. (European landscapes tend to be wider than they are high and emphasize the horizon, while East Asian landscapes tend to be higher than they are wide and emphasize scale. Each convention produces a remarkably different affect.) There is no art, or even expression, without conventions of some sort; conventions are the means by which things are expressed, the (sometimes literal, sometimes figurative) vocabulary and grammer we use to convey things. In this sense, conventions are a type of language.

Barthes refers to what he calls the 'Flaubertization' of writing, by which he means a move to a notion of writing as 'hard work', a laborious craft. Writers such as Flaubert, in other words, attempted to cure their increasing sense of alienation from bourgeois Literature by figuring themselves as workers, craftsmen and craftswomen. It is obvious, however, how easily such a strategy can be absorbed by dominant culture and transformed into bourgeois cultural values which have always in themselves emphasized hard work and perseverance.

Thus, MFA programs, writer's workshops and James Wood.

...An even more important and far-reaching example follows the discussion of Flaubert's strategy of hard work, that being the emergence in the nineteenth century of the realist novel. Realism and Naturalism (nowadays a less commonly used term) set out to cure the alienation of literary writing by producing an accurate and artless form. One definition of realism in the novel which is still employed in university courses today is as follows: 'Realism, a form of writing which does not bring attention to its own artifice, its own constructedness'. Barthes's thesis is, however, confirmed in that very definition, since the realist novel, so dominant from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is by definition an alienated form of writing, hiding its literariness at the same time as establishing this more as the standard of 'good writing', of 'literary' writing. Barthes refers to the fact that the realist novel is at one and the same time the kind of novel still privileged in bourgeois schools and the kind of novel officially sanctioned by Soviet Communism and its interenational off-shoots, such as the PCF (Writing Degree Zero: pg 58-61). The realist novel, far from creating an unalienated mode of writing, has become the 'sign of Literature' for both bourgeois and anti-bourgeois culture. ... Thus, a mode of writing that was created initially in an attempt to move beyond literary conventions towards an accurate representation of the social world, ends by establishing tenacious codes and conventions for the creation of the illusion of reality.

Roland Barthes, Graham Allen

In the mid to late nineties, Eric Rosenfield and I founded a webzine called YanktheChain.com, which was an attempt to duplicate in internet form the sort of xeroxed zines that helped drive the underground music scene of the eighties. That attempt more or less failed, but we did end up doing some cool and interesting things, giving me the opportunity to publish a satirical hitlist entitled "This is not a hitlist" in response to an earlier post that had gotten a warrant issued for Eric's arrest in the State of Connecticut. Eric later plead no contest to the charges, which were, frankly, bullshit and I got off scott free. Much of this was done in pursuit of one of our many mottoes and mission statements, in this case the fun idea that we had been "Using Their Machines Against Them Since 1899."

At this point, it's clear that "Using Their Machines Against" them is an idea whose time has come. At this point, three things are clear 1.) Various large and powerful political entities are fucked up and are more concerned with covering their asses than they are in doing The Right Thing™ 2.) Occasionally, if not for the outrage in the blogotwitterverse about the villainous actions of these entities, nothing would have been done about it. 3.) There is a lesson to be learned from this.

The lesson is that the time has come for a strategic view of how exactly the asymmetrical warfare of the electronic proletariat, by which I mean the people who make the communications economy work, against the electronic capitalists who own the means of production can actually be fought. More importantly, this model is one that gives a way forward for those of us who want to do something to shape politics and challenge the status quo of global capitalism in the years to come.

So Kindle just announced a $139 wifi ereader along with their new $189 3G Kindle model. This competes with the Nook's $150 wifi and $199 3G readers, the price just enough lower to be giving B&N the finger. Only a little while ago, Sony's $199 reader with no connectivity at all seemed like a decent buy, but now it looks ridiculous, even with it's own price dropped to $150. And the 3G Sony Reader that was $400 and has now plummeted to $250? Still an overpriced joke. Since the introduction of the iPad, ebook-only readers have been engaged in a vertigo-inducing race to the bottom. Meanwhile, independent ebook readers, like Cool-Er, have been driven out of business because they can't meet loss-leader price points.

So how long until there's $100 reader? A $50 one? How about a free ereader, given away to lock you into an ebook format? Time will tell.

Adam Fieled has published a very interesting essay at Word For/Word about what he sees as a needed resurgence of metaphysical concerns in contemporary poetics. I largely agree with his thesis that the poetics of previous generations, in particular those of the American avant-garde of the latter half of the twentieth century, have been overly enmeshed in a variety of materialisms. There are notable exceptions, of course, chief among them I think would be poets of the Beat generation like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg and a few others from the New York School, most notably Joseph Ceravolo. But in surveying the poetics of the major movements of the last 50 years of poetry, it's clear that in particular the obsessions of post-structuralism and the new criticism with the text as material object have infected a great deal of the late poetries with a pervasive materialism that has created the problems that Fieled notes. I don't want to quibble with the problematization as Fieled conceives it, but I do see a flaw in his historical analysis that I'd like to reformulate because I think it will make clearer those problems as well as help to point out possible approaches to solutions in the search for a way forward.

Wet Asphalt favorite Tom Bissell (author of the recent, wonderful Extra Lives) has a new article in Harpers about the Rocky Horror of our time, a film that is mesmerizingly bad. Subscription required to read it at the link, or you can just go out and buy the issue, trust me, it's well worth it.

Also not our typical link material, but this article about the man who played a perfect game of The Price is Right is fascinating and really well written, by excellent journalist Chris Jones.

A comic that gives an excellent summary of what's wrong with moon hoax theories.

It's always nice to read a new interview with Alan Moore, where he talks about comics, magic and his new project, Unearthing.

A weird, alternate reality comic called The Moon Prince is my new favorite web comic. Now if only they had an RSS feed...

And as always, FICTION TIME:

Wet Asphalt favorite Brian Francis Slattery wins the Brain Harvest Mega Challange with a story called "The World Is a Voice in My Neighbor’s Throat", which is as well-executed a short-short as you're likely to find.

The Canadian Radio series The Vanishing Point made a series of adaptations of the stories of legendary writer JG Ballard. It's JG Balllard. Go listen.

James Wood is perhaps the most celebrated literary critic around, and his offer of employment at the New Yorker a few years ago was practically an inevitability. Long time readers of this blog will know I have mixed feelings about the man, on the one hand praising his analysis and critical acumen, and on the other despairing his hopelessly conservative tastes and high modernist sensibility. However, I never quite grasped the true depths of what is deeply wrong in his critical understanding until I read his most recent book, How Fiction Works.

Understand: this is a book that spends three chapters talking about the importance of detail (before Wood concludes that he is "ambivalent" about details in fiction), but has not one single chapter about plot. Indeed, plot is twice dismissed as juvenile, and Wood turns to the example of Flaubert again and again, the man who, Wood says, wanted to write a book about "nothing", that got by on style alone.