Uncategorized – Page 27 – Auxiliary Memory

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes. And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial. Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year. Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed. Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year. After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities. Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more. When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time. I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly. Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes. Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is: Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes? When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon.

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan. I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio. And, I am enjoying reading it. I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me. But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch? Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted? If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way. I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too. I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit. I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status. It was plain old escapism. If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls. I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years. I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t. If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student. I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes. I think many people are better than I am at reading. I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader. When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing. That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me. I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each. I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them. Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes. I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table. They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life. I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading. Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life. Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time. I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime.

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim

True Blood

You’d think the public would have put a stake through the heart of vampire stories long ago but as long as creative new repackaging like the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer and HBO’s new series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries come along, the undead will continue to haunt us. I have to admit that I have a life-long prejudice against vampire stories. Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula was a cliché when I was a kid, and the concept seemed tired even back in the 1950s. I was arm-twisted into give the living dead another chance with Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which I truly admired, and that taught me to be more open about vampire stories.

The world of literature is full of recycled plots, characters and concepts. Who would have ever thought that millions of books could have been written around the concept of the private detective? True Blood blends murder mystery with the occult. I guess some ideas are primal and go back as far as the origins of consciousness. Being killed by a bite to the throat may even be an ancestral memory from when we were animals. And isn’t it interesting that Christian symbols are weapons against these evil creatures of the night? Especially since both myths use blood as the conduit of resurrection.

I did not intend to get into another HBO series, but I just happened to be in front of the TV when the premier episode started and within seconds I was hooked. Right from the beginning I was thinking, “Geez, this is great storytelling.” We’re not talking Shakespeare here, but A-1 quality Weird Tales. Just high octane lurid pulp fiction, told with humor and a sense of style.

Vampires have come out of the crypt and are demanding their civil rights, and humans are all over them seeking kinky sex, historical knowledge and even their blood. Vampire blood is rumored to have some of the same kind of properties that Chinese herbalists claim for rare animals on the endangered species list and its worth thousands on the black market.

True Blood is about the first vampire moving into the little Louisiana town of Bom Temps. You can follow the news of these events at Bloodcopy.com, an interesting viral marketing tool for HBO. Anna Paquin plays Sookie Stackhouse, a young telepathic waitress that is boy crazy for vampires and solves mysteries for The Southern Vampire Mystery book series. I’m amused that Charlaine Harris shares my last name and birthday, we were even born in the same year, and she lives in this part of the country. I don’t believe in astrology, but my reading taste seems to be in the same house as her writing.

The first episode of True Blood got me hooked, so I’m anxiously awaiting next Sunday night to see if I’ll keep wanting to watch it. I had come this close, picture me holding two fingers in a near pinch, to giving up TV this summer. I’m a TV addict. Shows as entertaining as True Blood, Pushing Daisies, Big Bang Theory and Mad Men keep me coming back. I constantly wonder why fiction is so addictive. I know it’s all make-believe. I know it’s all pixels on a screen. I know television is created by the elite of the world to get rich off us couch potatoes. But I’m mesmerized by good story telling.

I’ve got to admit the vampires are a silly concept. I could be spending time reading about quantum physics or learning to program rich Internet applications, but instead I flop on the couch and watch Anna Paquin pretend to be telepathic and Stephen Moyer pretend to be a vampire. Why is that so interesting? If I knew maybe I could churn out my own vampire stories and become one of those elite people that look down on television watchers but get rich writing stories that get slobs like me addicted.

Jim

Electoral College

An old friend of mine called me today sassing me with jokes about my piece on Sarah Palin. He’s afraid that too many men are going to use their below the belt brains to make their voting decision. I carefully informed him that although I found Sarah very attractive physically, I wasn’t going to vote Republican. He then told me my vote wasn’t going to count anyway. He said because of the way the Electoral College works, my vote, along with all the other democratic votes, won’t be used because it’s winner take all in each state, and currently Tennessee is running almost 2-to-1 for McCain. That won’t keep me from voting, but it sure is a downer bit of knowledge.

His state, Florida, is slightly for McCain, but can still go either way. I wonder if I should move to Florida and register there quickly? Or would it be better to move to Colorado where the democrats have a slight edge and help them solidify the lead. (I have no idea what the voter registration rules are, though.)

To play with these fun numbers, I found www.electoral-vote.com for quick statistics on state by state polling. I wish I knew more about these people to know if their statistics are accurate and if the creators of this web page are biased for either party. Politics really creates some fantastic web activity, and it’s extremely hard to know what’s real and not real. Snopes.com is a great place to check rumors of any kind, but during the election it has become a great political lie-detecting tool.

I can understand the theory behind the Electoral College, but I wonder why we can’t have direct voting, instead of using this ancient indirect method. The Wikipedia article I linked to above is quite fascinating, and gives many pro and con points to the concept. I can understand some of the pro Electoral College points in the abstract, but I just feel the one person one vote concept is more fair. I doubt things will ever change, so keeping an eye on www.electoral-vote.com is probably the best way to take the political pulse each day. If the Electoral College is the whole game, then stats following it are the ones to watch.

Jim

Revealing Your Personality With Science Fiction

Rusty Keele over at BestScienceFictionStories.com has invited blogging friends over to write about their favorite SF short story, and I’m one of the contributors. My post is queued up for tomorrow. I picked “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany from 1967. Be sure and stop by and read all the posts this week. Jason Sanford discusses his love of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” from 1950 and John DeNardo picks “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin from 1954, after sneaking in a plea for “Diamond Dogs” by Alastair Reynolds from 2003.

It’s revealing to see what other fans like in the way of short stories, especially when you only get to pick one. If had mentioned two, I might have included “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein from 1957.

To help refresh your memory of great short stories, look at these lists:

Are you a long time fan of science fiction? If you study these lists, even in a casual way, they will bring back a flood of memories. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of great science fiction stories. Our pitiful little minds just can’t hold them all our bio-RAM. I wouldn’t have picked a different story if I had read these lists before I wrote my essay for Rusty, but reading them now makes me realize how hard it would be to pick story #2.

It’s too bad reprint rights are so expensive because it would be huge fun to create my own personal anthology of favorites and publish it at Lulu.com. Imagine a fad of publishing personal anthologies of short stories, where you wrote forwards and afterwards for each story. Wouldn’t that make a unique way to communicate with new friends? In the old days you’d introduce yourself to people and leave your calling card. Imaging leaving your anthology.

Could you define your inner core personality with 12 short stories? I think “The Star Pit” comes close to revealing a lot of my personal programming. Picking the next 11 stories would be difficult, but I think I’ll start going through the above lists and make a try of it. Certainly, it will make a nice blog entry.

Jim

Being the Peacock

It is the male peacock that wears the fancy dress and struts his finery to attract the less flashy lady peahens. In the animal world it generally appears to be the male that gets all dolled up to catch the female, so why in our species are the females the disciples of Vogue? With animal courtship the males do all kinds of crazy things to show off because it’s the females who get to make the final decision. Human females also get to make our final decisions on mating, but it also appears they get to do all the gaudy displaying too? Or is that true?

Males of our species do show off by making money, showing strength, doing dashing deeds, while only using a modest amount of flashy color and huge tail feathers. Hell, suits are in by the young men again. You can’t get less flashy than a suit. Last night I saw a rock band all wearing black coats, white shirts and dark ties. Their looks were dull but they were making a big noise to attract women.

In our species it appears that the males are still the ones that show off, but somehow the role of preening was giving to our ladies. From fashion runways to Vegas shows to Miss America pageants you can see the extremes of female plumage.

I think this biological programming has had a tremendous impact on female behavior and psychology, making women very different from men. Okay, I can hear all the protests now. Yes, I know some men love to show off their costuming and some women don’t. But I think this programming subroutine goes far deeper than outfits. Women are a thousand times more concerned about their looks then men. Why is that?

Let me give an example. Among my lady friends, and I’m mostly talking about women in their fifties, I’m starting to hear the same story repeated independently from all of them that makes me worry. They all hate to see themselves naked. One friend said she holds her hand in front of her eyes when she gets out of the shower to shield her vision from the image of her naked body in the mirror. When she says this I’m thinking I’d loved to see her step out of the shower and towel off, so it’s not that she’s bad looking. But why has she become so hideous to herself that she won’t look at a mirror until she’s dressed and ready to hide her face in makeup?

If this was an isolated comment I wouldn’t have much evidence for my case, but I hear stories like this over and over again. We’ve reached an age where my women friends are horrified by their bodies but I’m not, not by mine or theirs. I still want to look up their dresses and down their blouses to catch whatever glimpses I can. And another common thing I hear from these women are gripes about men wanting younger “firmer” women.

They seemed obsessed with the word “firmer” too, because they say it with such resentment. And no matter how much I tell them I’m still physically attracted to women my age and even a bit older they don’t believe it. They say I’m an oddball and 99% of normal men only want to look at twenty-something women. Sure we like looking at younger women, but I’ve talked to my fellow boomers, and the consensus is older women can be just as hot.

Women may blame their resentment on men, but I’m starting to wonder if the problem isn’t theirs. Sure there are men obsessed with sweet young things, but none of my pals are like that. I think a lot of men have to chase younger women because as they get older the females of their generation stop wanting to be caught, forcing those guys to go further afield to hunt. But this isn’t the point of my story. I want to focus on the psychology of being the peacock.

I think both sexes are cursed by their biological programming. Personally and culturally we’re possessed by the drive to reproduce. This is understandable from a biological point of view, but why doesn’t the sex drive shut off when the baby making years are over? When women go through menopause, why don’t they suddenly wake up and think, “Gee, I feel great. I don’t have to preen anymore for those goddamn males always chasing after me.” And then relax into a new lifestyle. Why should women hate their bodies just because the sign “Great Babies Made Here!” gets turned off?

From the male side of things I wished my thoughts weren’t constantly befuddled by my cells urging me to go make babies. Obviously, the reason why I still want to see fiftyish women get out of the shower is from residual programming to reproduce. I’m already hearing all those people thinking, “Well men can make babies until they die.” Just because we can, and just because we have the drive, doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Evolution designed us to live long enough to reproduce and then die. Our brains helped us beat those plans and we live much longer than evolution planned. At a certain point in both the lives of men and women we get to an age where babies aren’t wanted. But the damn baby making programming inside of us doesn’t shut off.

Woman feel angst about losing their younger bodies and men feel angst about not getting laid as often. It appears that the women who looked the best in youth hate themselves the most while aging. Of course this is well illustrated by Hollywood starlets pursing plastic surgery till they have faces that look like rigor mortis of death. The nature of women playing the peacock was well illustrated in an old movie I saw the other night, Mr. Skeffington, with Bette Davis as a beauty obsessed woman constantly courting marriage proposals even after she was married.

I feel sorry for my women friends. Why can’t they accept wrinkles and sags? Firm tits and ass are only signs that say, “I Make Babies.” Why can’t old guys understand that the urge to chase young women is your cells tricking you into fatherhood? In the end, I think the burden of the peacock syndrome on women is far harder than left-over horniness in men. I don’t hate my body because I can’t get laid. Being a peacock when the feathers fall out must be painful and pathetic.

I have a long running argument with one of my lady friends. She says who we’re attracted to is mental, and I say it’s biological. Well honey, I think if it’s mental you would be able to rationalize yourself out of the peacock syndrome.

Jim