Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[jbjb]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html

Mr. Kaufman - you need to get out more.

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

Great - an invitation to fight - the perennial fallback of the intellectually outgunned.

You're clearly under the impression that your overwrought linguistic bombast sounds intelligent. I hate to tell you, but it doesn't - just pretentious.

If you actually tried to argue some of the points, or give some evidence for your claims, then you might be taken more seriously. As it is, you just come across as a rather sad, bitter and twisted individual who blames his lack of success on the world not being right rather than his own inadequacies.

/JB

[Lo Zeno]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html


STATEMENT:

Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.

It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many, if not all of you, regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.

And yes, there will be a test.

Huh?
There's one thing that probably slips your oh-so-acculturated mind:
we read.

Exactly that, we read. Just because we use an e-reader (and no, Kindle isn't the only option) it doesn't make it any different from reading on paper.

Just to let you know, my e-reader does contain Proust's works, the Old Testament, Sophocles, Socrates, George Eliot, Dante Alighieri, Shakespear, Tolstoy and many many others. And, lo and behold, most of us have already read in full those classics that you mention. And I can repeat by heart many great latin and italian classics.
And do you know why? Because we value the text more than the medium.
What is a book, is it the paper it is written on it or is it the text that the author wrote?

Just ask yourself that.
Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity it's true, and I can tell you one thing: paper does not increase your brain capacity, it merely develope your index finger, and contributes to the death of trees.

Your brain increases only if you use it. And I must say, today I have seen one who doesn't use it.

[gollu]

Well, Alan, frankly you lost me with your last post.
Sticking labels on 50000 people community and all that after you earlier mentioned the holocaust... Biiiiig mistake.
I'll not come and wrestle you, mainly because I don't live in the US. But as it happens I've read some of the classics you've mentioned. So why don't you give a try to those evil ebook readers and bring some first person experience in your next post?

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by meraxes

Are you serious? Why not? Competition is all about having more choice - how can more choice be something not to like? Are you worried that you might make the wrong choice? Or that other people might?

You're right of course. When I said I don't like it, I meant it purely as a personal taste, just as I don't like MySpace or donuts. I don't mean they should be banned, I just don't like them

Similarly, I am very attached to reading as a means of acquiring information or getting away from it all. I don't like that some information out there is available not in written form, but only in audio or video. Podcasts are an example. But I'm also aware that podcasts are enjoyable and useful to many, and yes, it's good that they are available.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Wow! Poor Mr. Kaufman!

It's an essay, for Pasta's sake.... I may disagree with it, but it's heartfelt. Let the guy lament an era passing by, it's O.K., really. As he says, it's only "only a private complaint."

And, it's preposterous to claim offense. Kaufman feels strongly about the physical book, and it is natural to relate to something which has strongly impacted his early life. Methinks his imagery works well for what he intends to convey.

Actually, his imagery is the problem for me. As I said, the Nazi references are uncalled for and just plain indecent. Remove them and yes, you just have a heartfelt rant from someone who feels threatened by the changes around him. I can relate to that. There's just no need to call me a Nazi because I don't feel threatened by the same things.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html


STATEMENT:

Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.

It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many, if not all of you, regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any on this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.

And yes, there will be a test.

This is wrong on so many levels, I shouldn't bother to reply. You probably won't read it anyway. Sorry, I have better things to do than wrestle with you over what I am allowed to read, and how. Although I might be interested to know why you think physical force should decide this issue?

And this is probably very stupid of me, but I won't resist mentioning that I am, at the moment, reading Proust and re-reading Stendhal in e-ink form. But I'm sure that doesn't count as reading, since I am a zombie enslaved to a machine anyway

[Alan Kaufman]

Dear FlorenceArt,
Yours is actually the sole reply from among 230 postings here that resonates with me (I have read each and every one: a private survey of e-book readers, to unearth signs of intelligent life: yours is the only evidence that I've so far found).
About my use of Holocaust imagery, I note that you reside in France. My mother was a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who was betrayed, at age 12, both by Western civilization and the French nation. In a world that engaged in futuristic Buck Rogers fantasies, she was hunted for years like an animal, first through the streets of Paris, then in the unoccupied zone in the south of France and finally through the mountains of northern Italy.

Her pursuers were not only German Nazis but French Vichy fascists and Italian Blackshirts. The means used to search for and identify Jews were, in part, sponsored by IBM, without whose early-stage primitive computor input the Holocaust could not have occured as it did. My people, the Jewish People, were exterminated by technological methods. In fact, it was the Nazi obsession with technology that in part fueled the Holocaust, as one technocrat after another sought to devise better means of more efficiently murdering ever-larger numbers of people. It was their way to climb the ladder of ambition.

The link between the culture of technology and that of mass murder were both unarguable and logical, since technology, though portending to serve man in fact enslaves him.It is even possible to think that technology in part precipitated the Holocaust, since the impetus to proceed was often the result of successful invention, which encouraged actions on an ever greater scale. It is the nature of technology to outstrip itself for no other reason than that it can. And so too with mass murder which, after a point, achieves a momentum of its own, which in turn frames its purpose.

At the heart of Naziism lay two principle focii: the Jew and the Book. The Nazis targeted both concurently. They saw control of the book and newspaper industry and their eventual destruction as integral to their plan for global domination. Their aim was to destroy the Jews and create a brave new world. In their attitudes to the book, they very much bore resemblance to today's tech-intoxicated aditvists who argue that books are "bound-dead trees", doomed to a deserved obsolescence, and who though they themselves barely read at all are fixated upon lifting texts out of the physicalrealm and
transferring them to electronic media, where they can be easily controlled and in all likelihood forgotten.

The Nazis, like today's hi-techers, presented themselves as forward-looking progressives enacting destinies beyond any average person's imagining. Butthogh they promised heaven, they brought hell. And I contend that the unchecked virus of technology that has invaded the very pores of human culture is rapidly ushering the downfall of all that makes humanity worthwhile. What it offers as replacement is a void of machines, apps, addictive games; there is no social fabric anymore, all of it transferred to the internet where each acts through the avatar of an invented online identity.

There is no relation to the haptic world, the world of touch, sensation, interface. Hi-Tech is literally appropriating the human and creating a black whole down which entire populations are dissapearing. And I maintain that hi-tech as is will produce, inevitably, the conditions that will lead to levels of barbarism and totalitarianism equal to or even surpassing those of the National Socialists.

Lastly, as the son of a survivor, I have learned to regard two factors as indicative of the health of a society: it's relation to the Jew in its midst, and its relation to the book.
And in both these, we in America are dramatically failing. Anti-Semitism in this country and around the world, and most certainly in France, is rife. And the widespread abandonment of books, bookstores nnd book culture, in favor of machines lead me to believe that our culture, our society, our civilization itself are heading for a monumental catastrophe.

About the offer to 'thumb-wrestle', that is a joke. Perhaps you're unaware of what thumb-wrestling is: a game one plays with children, an effort by one person's thumb to pin down another's thumb. Generally the game induces glee, laughter. That ought not to frighten you.

Both Proust and Stendahl understood what is callow about their societies and if they could not forsee that in a relatively short time modern society was about to turn
genocidally murderous, still, they knew where to look for signs--in those little epiphanies of personal or historical experience where, in a thunderclap, the whole truth is illuminated.

Thank you for your response.
Au Revoir!
Alan

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Your responses, in fact, are amazingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words.

Sir,

Better monosyllabic but grounded in hard facts, than overflowing with metaphor, but based solely on your overwrought imagination. You have got an audience of sorts here, which may in fact be larger than the audience your book has managed to attract. Why not use the occasion to actually argue your case instead of just coming up with ever more imaginative invective and threatening to beat the crap out of your critics? That's no way to win over a hostile crowd. Take me for example. I'm nowhere near as good with words as you. And I've had my share of disagreements on this board. I'm also 6 foot 3, 220 pounds, have been doing mixed martial arts for years, and I'm a quarter of century younger than you. Yet you don't see me inviting my detractors to come over to Kiev so that I could beat them up. Practicalities aside, such a step would probably fail to impress my intellectual superiority, such as it is, on said detractors. I suspect it's not going to work for you, either.

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

I don't like that some information out there is available not in written form, but only in audio or video.

That's largely the kind of information that would never have been available at all, were it not for audio and video. Podcasts especially. I don't think your own reading choices have been narrowed by the availability of other formats.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Further Response To His Mobile Read Critics From Alan Kaufman, Author of 'The Electronic Bookburning” (Evergreen Review #20)
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html


STATEMENT:

Hi-tech does not increase your brain capacity: it merely exercizes your thumbs.

Not a few of you walk around with highly developed thumbs jammed deep into your own eye, like overweaned Oedipus Rex's, though lacking the nerve of that tragic king to pluck out your own eyes in order to better see the truth.

For you are merch-juggled children breastfed on marketing strategies hatched before you were born and are so fully inculcated with h-tech propoganda that it is safe to say that with few exceptions virtually your entire generation haven't the capacity to interrogate your own experience vis a vis the addictive, soul-numbing machines that have become mocking substitutes for your human experience.

Not a single one of you on Mobile Read, in your responses to my point, demonstrate a capacity to question the Matrix in which you float: a mental and spiritual prison of the most engulfing social conditioning ever foisted by private enterprise upon a peer group of human beings.

In this regard, you are no different than the children of any emergent totalitarian society, who cannot imagine a world without Big Brother. And it is chiefly that which I find so heartbreaking about the impact of hi-tech: not the machines per se but what the machines have made of you.

In fact, I sense from many of the responses that very few among you have bothered even to read in full or at all either of my essays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are troublingly similar, as though formed from the same pool of 50 or so monosyllabic words. This is, as I understand it, endemic to the level of discourse that occurs in hi-tech: a perpetual public convocation of spewing illiterates.

It appears that my essay has inspired a generational backlash among many of you, who see this as a face-off between an old fart white book-worshipping Luddite (how you portray me) and mainly young, progressive, enlightened and exciting hi-techers (how many, if not all of you, regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any on this site. Lets thumbwrestle for three shirtless private rounds in an alley of my choice, and see who's left victorious: my 6'2”, 200 pound, tattooed, 57 year old military veteran Bronx-born poetry writing streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly digitized selves.

If defeated, I'll French with a Kindle but if you go down, you must not only toss your device but read in full classics that I'll list, ranging from Marcus Aurelius, Sophocles, Homer and the Old Testament to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Babel, Stendahl, Proust and George Eliot, to name but a few.

And yes, there will be a test.

Ooh, he won a poetry competition. Ooh, he was once in the military. Ooh he's tellling me his height.

What an internet tough-guy he is. How many more memes can he fit in before he's finished do you think? We've been Godwinned, now it's internet tough guy, my money is on a Rick Roll or a Chocolate Rain before too long, or maybe even - to strike terror into our nazi-techno capitulating-surrender monkey hearts - a dramatic look gopher?

LOL. Just. LOL.

Hey Kaufman, GTFO our internets you Troll.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by meraxes

That's largely the kind of information that would never have been available at all, were it not for audio and video. Podcasts especially. I don't think your own reading choices have been narrowed by the availability of other formats.

I didn't say they were. But I would rather have this same information, not available elsewhere, in written form. A wonderful piece of software I'm using ships with video tutorials, and no written ones. It took me ages to start getting acquainted with the program because of that.

But really, as I said, I was just stating a personal preference, nothing more. There is still a world of information and fun available in written form, and it won't go away. I can live with missing a few podcasts, or if I really want that information I can just try to listen to them.

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

And the widespread abandonment of books, bookstores nnd book culture, in favor of machines lead me to believe that our culture, our society, our civilization itself are heading for a monumental catastrophe.

I still fail to see how that follows from anything you said. Any logical links are missing completely. Can you actually read, or do you just write? Have you seen the main question people here are putting to you? How is reading off a plastic screen any different from reading off a sheet of paper? Apart from the fact that we don't need to have a separate plastic screen for each new piece of text? How is unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of cheap books worse than limited access to a few thousand expensive ones in your local bookstore?

[gollu]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Dear FlorenceArt,
Lastly, as the son of a survivor, I have learned to regard two factors as indicative of the health of a society: it's relation to the Jew in its midst, and its relation to the book.
And in both these, we in America are dramatically failing. Anti-Semitism in this country and around the world, and most certainly in France, is rife. And the widespread abandonment of books, bookstores nnd book culture, in favor of machines lead me to believe that our culture, our society, our civilization itself are heading for a monumental catastrophe.

How did we get to antisemitism now? Such responses are going to render me an antisemit, and I am a Jew living in Israel .

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

Dear FlorenceArt,
Yours is actually the sole reply from among 230 postings here that resonates with me (I have read each and every one: a private survey of e-book readers, to unearth signs of intelligent life: yours is the only evidence that I've so far found).

Well, you have to admit that the kind of text you wrote is not going to bring about the best in people. How do you expect anyone to reply in a civilized and rational manner to a paranoid rant linking something we happen to like to the Nazis?

I'm not sure I should be flattered that you are singling me out. If you really think that the people who posted here are illiterate brutes, maybe you should have a look at what we read. But I have to warn you, this thread discusses e-books and p-books (and there are even some audio books in there) indiscriminately, because it is about books, not about media.

I am terribly about your personal and family history, but it does not give you the right to distribute Nazi labels. And what does my being French have to do with this discussion?

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

And what does my being French have to do with this discussion?

I think you're meant to feel grateful for being singled out from the rest of the microbial life here. And also to feel a bit guilty for being French (i.e. needing to prove as best you can that you're not an anti-Semite). Guilt and gratitude, what better combination to induce a more reverantial attitude on your part to Mr Kaufman's rants. You don't want to look an ungrateful anti-Semite, now do you?