Keepers: reading to understand
Last week, I got rid of my iPad Pro and bought a Kindle Oasis. I was a huge proponent of the Kindle when it first debuted 12 years ago(!), but I switched back to reading physical books in 2016 and I haven’t looked back.
I won’t get into the interesting but tiresome arguments regarding the superiority of one medium over the other, except to say that spatial memory definitely comes into play for me. I love the smell and the feel of books, of course. But more importantly, physical books have a distinct effect on my ability to recall information I’ve read. If I can associate a passage with a physical location in the book (ie. about one-third through, center of the right page), and flip back to it without much hassle, I’ll take that over the portability and superior annotation and notes capabilities of the Kindle.
So I didn’t get the Kindle for books. Instead, I got it—somewhat paradoxically—for web articles. For years, I’ve read articles I wanted to read later in Instapaper on my iPad. There, the reading experience is stellar, and I can easily like and archive articles, or save them to another app, or tweet them.
It’s that last point that had me looking for a new reading experience. Lately, I can’t escape the fact that as I read, I’m constantly on the lookout for the tweetable bits. If it’s a good piece, after all, I’m going to share it on Twitter, so it makes sense that I keep an eye out for the Twitter equivalent of the book blurb.
But that method of reading (no matter how hard I try to combat it) leads to skimming, to jumping between apps, to going down a Wikipedia or a YouTube rabbit hole when I come across something I want to research a bit more. It’s cognitive overload, when all I want to do is read.
Hence the Kindle. I use Instapaper’s built-in send-to-Kindle feature to get a digest of my latest articles sent to my Kindle every Friday morning. And when I read, there is nothing to distract me. It’s just me and the words, and I’ve already found it to be a huge boon for my focus. I couldn’t quite get lost in the text the way I did before the web. The Kindle gives that immersive reading experience back to me. Frankly, I didn’t know how much I missed it.
My Keepers
So, on Wednesday, we received reports from children of a lice outbreak in one of the cells where there were about twenty-five children, and what they told us is that six of the children were found to have lice. And so they were given a lice shampoo, and the other children were given two combs and told to share those two combs, two lice combs, and brush their hair with the same combs, which is something you never do with a lice outbreak. And then what happened was one of the combs was lost, and Border Patrol agents got so mad that they took away the children’s blankets and mats. They weren’t allowed to sleep on the beds, and they had to sleep on the floor on Wednesday night as punishment for losing the comb. So you had a whole cell full of kids who had beds and mats at one point, not for everybody but for most of them, who were forced to sleep on the cement.
Whether or not you call them concentration camps, there can be no doubt that the inhumane treatment of children crossing the southern border is unconscionable. There’s a lot of necessary reporting making the rounds, but if you’re looking for a good place to start, Isaac Chotiner interviewed one of the lawyers tasked with documenting the suffering of these poor kids.
Looking for ways to help? Start here.
Gobo is an interesting social media experiment from MIT Labs. Connect your social media accounts, then apply granular filters for things like rudeness, politics, and obscurity to gain a deeper understanding of your timeline, and the information you’re exposed to.
But it turns out that culture, according to Watson, can easily reproduce the wrong mistakes, at least the wrong mistakes for the human beings who comprise the members of a culture, since the wrong mistakes are parasites within memeplexes, and we humans are their hosts. We use antibacterial soap, which makes us more vulnerable to disease because a wrong mistake has seized our imaginations — with the help of memeplex-like corporations defending and increasing their profits. We believe what cultural structures give us room to believe, and those structures defend themselves by making us believe in them in the manner of the three big religions or, to take an example that Watson recurs to, the religion of capitalism.
Memes are having a moment, not just because they are the social currency of the internet, but because understanding how they work on a fundamental level helps us understand so much of the world beyond it.
One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.
Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.
If you’ve never read Ursela K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, do. (It’s about so much more than fiction.)