Letter from the President
Winter 2008
By Roy Blount Jr.
As your president, it is incumbent upon me to keep abreast of the latest word-delivery systems. To that end the Guild has kindly provided me with a Kindle, the new wireless book-downloading device from Amazon. Here is how the Kindle makes me feel: Old.
I’ll tell you what made me feel good, the other day: a beautiful little writing instrument someone handed me in the offices of my publisher. Sleek and keen this instrument was, and self-correcting. With one end of it, I could inscribe tiny little notes on a copyedited manuscript, and when I was not satisfied with my note, a simple operation enabled me to reverse this instrument 180 degrees and use its other end to whisk the note away. Then, step three, the instrument was re-reversible, allowing me to inscribe, hopefully (this is an unimpeachable use of the word hopefully), a better note. It had been years since I had used, to its full potential, a good number-three pencil.
I am not a Luddite. Yes, I murdered a recalcitrant computer-linked printer once, whang, a single hammer-blow of the fist, and that action did my heart good. But then I had to go out and get another, more expensive printer. So technology won. As it will, if you fight it. I am no more interested, generally, in smashing machines than I am in stomping on snakes. The only thing that upsets me more than the inevitability of some new electronic device is the likelihood that with one false move I will break it. Or send it off into some bizarre realm of hyper-functionality that no one but the twelve-year-old visionaries who designed the device can orient themselves in.
What I am is a late, slow, wary adopter, or adapter. When confronted with a new development in the word-processing field I never feel that I am breasting a tape—coming out ahead—but that I am breasting another wave of innovation: beating on against the current, borne back ceaselessly . . . .
Can you imagine Scott Fitzgerald—drunken, neurotic, life-stricken yet warpedly heroic—composing on a gizmo more complex than his complexes? Well, he probably could have screwed up a pencil.
“Transformative is a word we hear a lot lately, and that the Kindle may be. But so far it doesn't have a hold on me. My eyes wander...”
- Roy Blount Jr.
I love the box my Kindle came in. The box is about the size of two copies, side by side, of Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. It is white with lots of letters and symbols—square-root signs, hieroglyphs, single brackets, free-range apostrophes—sprinkled upon it as if tossed by hand. When I disengaged an elastic loop from a neat little metal button, the box opened up into two compartments.
One of the compartments held the two cables required to power up the device and to link it to a computer. So now I have five wires, including the two that connect my laptop to different power sockets and the one that charges my cell phone, tangled up in my briefcase. That compartment also held an instruction book, which of course is no more comprehensively helpful than any other printed set of instructions for an electronic device. To learn how the Kindle works, you have to start working the Kindle.
It’s a good-looking little guy, about the size of a slim trade paperback. If you have a softcover copy of, say, The Compass in Your Nose and Other Astonishing Facts About Humans, by Marc McCutcheon, on your desk, as I do (“Psychotics rarely yawn, and people who are severely ill tend to refrain from yawning until their condition improves. . . . All animals yawn, even fish and reptiles”), you can get a sense of the Kindle’s scale. Unlike The Compass in Your Nose, the Kindle is elegantly tapered at each end. But it doesn’t flex and bend engagingly, as The Compass does, in your hands. And its screen is only slightly larger than the average conventioneer name tag.
A removable sticker told me how to charge the battery and turn the Kindle on. Then I was greeted, rather self-congratulatorially I thought, by the Kindle User’s Guide: “Congratulations! You are reading your first Kindle book.” The guide then advised me, “if you haven’t done so already,” to follow the instructions on the sticker telling me how to charge the battery and turn the Kindle on. But how could I be reading the user’s guide if I hadn’t already charged the battery and turned the Kindle on? Speaking of elegance, I’ll say this for The Compass in Your Nose: the first page of its introduction does not say, “If you have not done so already, open the cover of this book and flip through the front matter until you reach this page.” As far as I can tell, by the way, Kindle books lack front matter—copyright page, dedication, that sort of thing—so it’s a bit like jumping into bed with someone you’ve hardly met.
But what the heck. The Kindle is awfully pretty, and it knows what it’s up to. In half an hour, from a hotel lobby, for less than thirty dollars altogether, it wirelessly downloaded six books from Amazon.com (some in copyright and costing $9.99 or $7.99, some out of copyright and costing $l.80): Captain Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue; The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke; A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin; the Rosetta Books version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions; and Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. I can search these books instantaneously. I can click on any line to get a dictionary definition of every word in that line. I can click pages quickly back and forth. I can affix my own notes to the text. To me, the little letter-keys that I have to poke in order to spell out these notes are inhumanly teeny-tiny, but then my thumbnails have not developed any text-messaging skills. The black-on-grey screen-page looks passably like ink on paper, and the type size is adjustable. Apparently you can download music, too, and an abbreviated daily version of, among other periodicals, The New York Times.
And yet here I sit at home surrounded by mounds of, like, actual books (the word is related to beech, perhaps because the earliest books were inscribed on wood from that tree), and literal newspaper clippings, and various other sorts of clutter that I dare say high-schoolers of today will soon regard (well, they must already) as ludicrous. At present the Kindle costs too much—$399—for me to have actually bought one, but something like the Kindle (Sony makes a similar electronic reader) undoubtedly has more of a future than I do. And then it will be replaced by a nano-receiver implanted in the brain. For all we know, we are already living and writing and arguing with copy editors and receiving disappointing royalty reports in just such a receiver, in the cerebellum of a 12-year-old visionary in Singapore.
Transformative is a word we hear a lot lately, and that the Kindle may be. But so far it doesn’t have a hold on me. My eyes wander, and so do my hands and the compass in my nose. (According to The Compass in Your Nose, “All humans have a trace amount of iron in their noses . . . to help in directional finding relative to the earth’s magnetic field.”) In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut speaks of “beloved, frumpish” paperbacks that “gave off a smell . . . like flannel pajamas that hadn’t been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.” According to The Compass in Your Nose, “visual memories decline by fifty percent after three months while memories associated with smell decline by only twenty percent, even after a year.” Smell of course is a big part of taste. According to The Compass in Your Nose, the average American eats 20,000 eggs in a lifetime. My Kindle is a virtual chicken that I can take anywhere. It will lay relatively inexpensive eggs on demand, and it will keep some two hundred of them fresh for the foreseeable future. But to me they don’t quite taste like eggs.
