Al's Kindle

Al Filreis

I'm trying out the Kindle. So far I love it. It's true that the sort of books I read are generally not available in Kindle's format (sold only through Amazon), but a few are: e.g. Joan Didion's Political Fictions, including the fabulous essay "Clinton Agonistes." So I'm reading Didion on this little beautifully designed device. It feels very much like a paperback (it's intentionally the same size as most paperbacks). I like the way I navigate it. I've also subscribed to two newspapers (the Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer) and three Kindle-versioned blogs (Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Slate's blog). The newspapers are downloaded automatically to the Kindle early in the morning; the blogs are updated almost hourly. The thing uses the cellular network and so can download books or update blogs anywhere where one is in the range of cell service.

I do intend to use all the above, but my main notion is to read chapters, books, articles etc. of the sort that are sent to me as email attachments. I have found that I was only reading some of these, even if the Word doc sent to me was important or timely. I've downloaded such things - let's say the draft of an essay a friend is writing, or a dissertation chapter - but have felt it wasteful to print them out; yet if I didn't print them yet swore I'd read on the desktop's screen or even on my laptop, I never quite got to it. I still like to read while supine - and, in any case, somewhere away from my desk.

The Kindle is set up to enable one to email oneself (to an @kindle.com address that is automatically created at the time of purchase) any document. It arrives on the Kindle quickly and appears like any other book or article. Below you see Rachel Blau DuPlessis's new short essay on re-reading George Oppen. Below that you can see the Kindle it its black leather case - looking rather, again, like a paperback or small notebook. The thing travels well.

August 24, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.