Captain Outrageous, Sven Bierkets

What a fascinating talk. I really enjoyed Sven's style of writing and insight. It was interesting to hear the way his brain was working and analyzing the processes of reading. I'd like to just list a couple of cool quotes before I get into what I want to discuss...

"a description is really a prompt to get to the thought"
"to talk about reading is to talk about everything under the sun"
"the camera's eye proposes a whole field of suggestion"
"communication is always provisional"
"absolute imaginative transport"
"existential agitation"
"[library is a] exteriorized manifestation of content"
"readers are the sole recreators of what is coded in the text"

The lecture and discussions in their entirety were inspiring and thought provoking. What I found myself reacting most to was the contrast between technological reading and book reading: reading a Kindle vs. reading a book. Someone had posed the idea of quaintness in sitting down to read a book and this got my mind going (and to brag, I wrote down almost immediately what everyone got around to discussing).

Sven discussed the childhood experience of reading, of being completely submersed and displaced to another world, another realm, separate from the surrounding one. To me this signified a great slowing down of things. When we are on the computer or internet, things move fast- technology moves fast. It was Baudrillard was it not who discussed hyperstimulation? Information comes at us, pictures are a click away as are full explanations. This made me think of Adorno- this technology isn't chosen by us, it was forced upon us. This made me realize the significant contrast between sitting down to read a book and reading something online or on a Kindle: we have a choice in reading a book. We have made the choice to be submersed into someone else's world, to be molded and transformed by the work of an invisible person. Reading is interpersonal. When you think of a book, you think of an author. Reading a book connotates a person to page to person relationship. In my opinion, technology connotates machinery, computers, systems etc. Perhaps a programmer but not one with whom you could relate. Therefore reading a book is a slow reconnection with humanity and its original art forms, its a spiritual grounding process beyond comprehension. Any technological interference is a machine induced hyperstimulation of things. You have no relationship with an e-book, you have a relationship with your laptop based on commodity fetishism. But you do create relationships with your books, equally a commodity I understand, but I am trying to take this to a more intellectual level. There is indeed a nostalgia when you talk about how much you loved that book. There is indeed a lack of nostalgia when you remember reading something online.

Furthermore and conclusively I suppose I had a thought on my walk back to my dorm. I thought of my Junior year English Class in high school, how no one ever did the reading, no one ever cared, and the class would be silent (unless I was answering questions) and ignorant to the blessings of literature. And why shouldn't they have been? Cell phones in their laps and a computer at home where they could access the Sparknotes and Cliffnotes online to understand the book. We've come to an age where one doesn't even have to go to the bookstore to obtain the physical book of Sparknotes and Cliffnotes....Literature is available for download in a few easy clicks.

But who does the fault belong to I wonder. I blame the education system. Sven talked about the disappearance of his love for reading through the teenage years. In classes we are forced to read so much that the personal choice and personal enjoyment is stripped from us for years on end. Its really just one machine to the next that is slowly killing the mockingbird.