Kaufman links e-book trend to bookburning, Nazis

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Having him see is isn't "one or the other" that most of us love both our paper books and e-books.....that there is no difference in the reading experience once you get into a great story......thats what could have an effect.

I doubt it. His real problem is not that people are reading ebooks. He's just pissed off that these books aren't the ones he wrote. If one of his books suddenly became a Kindle bestseller, he'd be raving about the wonderful new technology that gives people access to great literary works (his being first and foremost in his mind).

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Books used to be the only means of spreading stories and knowledge. Now they have competition. I don't like it much,

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?

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Person A: Ancestor was subject to treatments during Holocaust. Person A was born in a time after with no first hand experience.

Person B: Born at same time as Person A yet has no ancestral connection with people subject to treatment during Holocaust.

It is quite acceptable for Person A to make statements in relation to said events (or a relational statement), yet Person B is criticised because he has no connection. Both Person A and B are making statements based upon 3rd hand information, yet it is ok for one, but not the other. Now before people jump up and down I am not Jewish but I have close family (biologically) who were subject to treatments during Nazi Germany's expansion in the 1940's. Does that make it ok for me to make statements about life in concentration camps? According to societal acceptance...YES, but ethically and morally I have no place to make statements with the exception of revealing factual and researched information.

That's because you live in a civilization that's gone totally mad with PC. Nobody likes to take personal responsibility, but everbody loves to take credit for what other people have gone through. I live in a country gone mad in totally different (and more serious) ways, but thankfully PC is not one of them.

[desertgrandma]

Originally Posted by meraxes

I doubt it. His real problem is not that people are reading ebooks. He's just pissed off that these books aren't the ones he wrote. If one of his books suddenly became a Kindle bestseller, he'd be raving about the wonderful new technology that gives people access to great literary works (his being first and foremost in his mind).

We do not know that.

He is obviously speaking from ignorance of what an ebook reader is, and can do.

Education is a wonderful thing.

I don't think anyone has ever sat with him and said "Look! This is what it does, this is why I love it, now pick a book you'd like to read, and go sit down with it. Any questions, speak out and I'll answer."

I think he's truly confusing ebook readers with ipods, the new smart phones and video game consoles...

[gollu]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Yes, but if he went to Amazon, he'd have to see the ranking on his novel, "Matches" - Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,223,850 in Books.

And he's got six reviews, of which three read like publishers' internal reviewers, one sounds like an honest positive review and two manage to give him less than three stars (one two-star and one one-star), here's the one-star.

********

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
245 pages instead of 25, October 20, 2006
By James E. O'Leary (Corpus Christi, Texas USA) - See all my reviews


Am I the only reviewer who wonders why Back Bay Books of Little-Brown didn't use an editor? This is repetitious beyond belief. The characters are also beyond belief. A character named "Falk" is the first person narrator who tells the same empty story over and over is so twisted and shallow as he kills arabs in the name of protecting Jews that I would have liked to shoot him myself, not just to put him out of his misery but to punish him for wasting my time. Yes, I did finish the book, if that's what you want to call it.

********

As you can see, not the greatest review.

I believe that writing "Matches" was his 'cathartic release' novel and we'll just have to see what he manages in his second novel to see if he really has what it takes.

Derek

I am sorry to get into the lowness of this thread, but the aforementioned post is really what I would not have expected from a member of this forum. Expressing opinion of a book and on an author one hasn't read, based on the lowest ranked review in amazon.com.
Congrats for falling so low.

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

I don't think anyone has ever sat with him and said "Look! This is what it does, this is why I love it, now pick a book you'd like to read, and go sit down with it. Any questions, speak out and I'll answer."

Well, he obviously feels sufficiently knowledgeable on the subject to rant about it at some length. He does have a blog, and he appeared in this thread quickly enough, which tells me he's not a technophobe. And if he really doesn't understand ebooks, as you suggest, it could only be because he deliberately chooses not to. No, I think delphi is right - he doesn't care what a kindle does or why people love it. He just feels threatened, he fears that ebooks are making him irrelevant - or maybe he just needs something to blame for his apparent lack of success.

Anyway, I don't really care about his rant as such, it just struck me how poorly argued it was. He just seems to think that if he uses enough invective, people will fail to notice that there aren't any facts or logic in his rant, no reasoning as such. Does he take his readers for a bunch of idiots?

[meraxes]

Originally Posted by gollu

I am sorry to get into the lowness of this thread...

We all feel for you. Hope the crown didn't fall off your noble brow as you were stooping to show us our wrongs.

[gollu]

Originally Posted by meraxes

We all feel for you. Hope the crown didn't fall off your noble brow as you were stooping to show us our wrongs.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

[pshrynk]

Once again, play nice.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by gollu

I am sorry to get into the lowness of this thread, but the aforementioned post is really what I would not have expected from a member of this forum. Expressing opinion of a book and on an author one hasn't read, based on the lowest ranked review in amazon.com.
Congrats for falling so low.

Excuse me? He comes here (as well as blathers all over the Internet) voicing his mis-informed stupidity and we're not supposed to throw feces balls right back at him? What do you think the Internet is, a high-society affair? A pod of right whales debating poetry? No, it's your local-yet-all-around-the-world mud-wrestling free-for-all.

Derek

Bring on the popcorn and the Rounds-Number Girls!

[fugazied]

Another delusional old school reader/writer. For some people technology and progress causes great fear, I think Kaufman is one of those.
The Jewish analogy is so utterly pathetic in it's attempt to be divisive and stir up emotions. I do not appreciate being called a nazi for using a Kindle and having 50+ books in a device that fits into my pocket or backpack with ease.

[Mr. Goodbar]

He does reference some valid points about the "dark side" of the internet, but how he equates an ebook to that and the holocaust escapes me.

He also seems to align those who develop our technology with corporate and governmental "drones". Having worked in the high tech industry in entry level to senior executive levels I find that laughable. The computer industry contains some of the most learned people that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing and I'm not just talking about technology knowledge, but the knowledge that comes from reading great works, traveling and meeting people from different cultures and generally experiencing a good and diverse slice of life. I think he needs to get out from behind his keyboard a little more!

[catsittingstill]

Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman

A Statement From Alan Kaufman, author of 'THE ELECTRONIC BOOKBURNING' To My Mobile Read Critics
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html

STATEMENT

We are slowly dissolving in a catastrophe of blandness. A stainless steel tableau of screen-mummified generic looking clone people placidly seated in the sun on perfect lawns of Astroturf, gaping at laptops and ipods and Blackberries.(snip)

Dear Sir,

Having cut my way, through the thicket of your verbiage in search of your point, I found myself somewhat disoriented. After crossing my own trail several times, I finally managed to make my way out to a road. I have departed the area, and will not be returning.

One of my old English teachers taught me a useful phrase. "When someone comes to you with a poem" he said, "and it's so mediocre you can find nothing to say that is both tactful and truthful, try this: 'I can see you feel very strongly about this.'"

Mr Kaufman--and I say this with all sincerity--I can see you feel very strongly about this.

Regarding--and forgive me if this was not your point; I became, as I said, somewhat disoriented in the thicket, which rapidly grew so deep I could no longer see the sun--electronic books destroying civilization in one swastika-adorned paroxysm of genocide, bookburning and broken glass I can only say this.

There there, honey. It will be okay.

[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.

[Slite]

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 indoctrinated 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 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 esaays but simply respond to each other's postings and vent with your thumbs instead of your minds.

Your responses, in fact, are amazingly 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 illiterarates.

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 of you regard yourselves).

So, I'd like to extend the following invite to any and all of you 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 streetfighting ass or your nerdy and ignorant Silicon Folly 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.

Oh dear. You really hit a lowwater mark with this post Mr. Kaufman. You compare us to nazis because we adopt a technology that make us be more diverse in our reading. And at the same time you threaten us by telling us how big and strong you are? Seriously, talk about using the same scare tactics that helped the Nazi-party to power in Germany during the 30's.

With this I will henceforth ignore anything you feel the need to say. I can only conclude that we are so far away from each other in our convictions that it is impossible to come to any kind of consenssus. But one thing I will not do is stoop to your level.

Feel free to fondle your old hardback books, along with all the other dinosaurs who will in a decade or so wake up, look around and wonder why noone is buying their "archaic" books.