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Literary Readings for the Easily Distracted

By JK Evanczuk on Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - View Comments

I am a perpetual optimist, especially on the issue of literature in the digital age. I believe that the Internet presents a number of wonderful new ways to create and distribute literature, and I firmly deny, deny, deny when faced with the all-too-ubiquitous argument that the Internet is killing the book.

One point on which I will concede, however, is that the screen is changing the way we think. After spending eight hours at a computer and simultaneously listening to music, checking Twitter or Facebook (more often than I ought to, I should note), answering emails, editing video, or whatever it is that I’ll end up doing on a given day, suddenly I feel very distracted when faced with an open book. Reading a book can be jarringly simple after a day of multitasking and multimedia; when your brain is trained to process multiple streams of information at the same time, at lighting speed no less, sometimes it can be difficult to focus on just one thing.

So for those people, there’s Teleportal Readings, a monthly web video series made for “those who love reading but readings.” Or, I’d like to add, for those who love readings but think that video recordings of them are terribly dull. Watch what a little green screen hoodoo can do for literature:

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This Week: Pride and Prejudice as Written in Emoticons, Why the Novel Will Never Die

By JK Evanczuk on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 - View Comments
Pride and Prejudice: the emoticon adaptation

Pride and Prejudice: the emoticon adaptation

On David Foster Wallace’s “scare quotes,” and the joys of editing him.

An essay on the quiet art of cartooning, which sounds quite a lot like the quiet art of writing fiction. Which I guess, technically, is the same thing. Via The Rumpus.

What contemporary literature will people still be reading a century from now?

Pride and Prejudice, as written in emoticons, via Booksquare.

Books are America’s fourth form of entertainment, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Even better news: there were more than four items on that list.

Why the novel will never die.

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5 Reasons Why the Novel Is Not A Dying Medium

By JK Evanczuk on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - View Comments

The book is not dead!Since starting Lit Drift, I’ve gotten used to reading a lot of doom-and-gloom opinion pieces about the death of the publishing industry. I’ve read predictions that the paperbound book will be totally replaced by digital books within the decade, or that we’ll all stop buying books and forget how to read, and so on. Most of it I’ve taken with a grain brick of salt, because I think at this point in our current techno-literary revolution it is far too early to tell where we’ll be in five–let alone ten–years.

Still, I can’t shake my anxiety after reading this recent article from The Guardian, in which Philip Roth–one of my favorite writers–says that the novel will be a “cult minority” in 25 years. He attributes the decline of the novel to the popularity of film, TV, and computers. It’s not the first time I’ve heard claims like this. But it’s unnerving to hear it from Roth.

He continues:

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen,” Roth said. “Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

Maybe I’ve been living in a happy non-reality for the last two decades, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. So as much as I love Philip Roth, I have to respectfully disagree. Read more »

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