Predicting the Apple Tablet

The computer press is buzzing with rumors of an Apple tablet computer.  I don’t think anyone knows anything for sure, and I expect Steve Jobs to wow people when he finally announces whatever he plans to show off as his next big product.  It may be a tablet computer, or it might be something surprisingly different.  Most people speculate it will be something to compete against netbooks and ebook readers, both of which are hot products that Apple currently doesn’t compete against.  A lot of rumor sites show an artist conception of a giant iPod touch like device.  Some sites are even predicting it will cost $800-900 dollars.

Well, if the Apple tablet is to compete against netbooks and ebooks the price needs to be a whole lot closer to $400.  I do think a touch screen tablet is the perfect competition to a netbook, but I’m not sure about such a device replacing ebooks.  Maybe for reading magazines, newspapers and web content, but not for reading fiction.  Think about it, reading fiction is something people do for hours on end, and imagine holding a heavy device that long?  I think the Kindle and Nook are too big.  My ideal ebook would be mostly screen, about the size between a mass market paperback page and a trade paperback page, weigh next to nothing, be extremely durable, and cheap enough so I wouldn’t be afraid to carry it everywhere I go.  That doesn’t describe any of the Apple tablet rumors.

If a new Apple device is going to be rolled out it must not compete with the iPhone or the MacBook, and that puts it squarely into the netbook space.  Netbooks have keyboards and work just like bigger computers.  A tablet doesn’t.  So how many of your everyday routines can be enhanced by a 10 inch touch screen?  For me, that would be something to replace magazines and newspapers.  If bookworms balk at paying $260 for an ebook reader to make novel reading easier, will newshounds accept spending $800 to make reading the news easier?  Not me.

You can get a 22” LCD monitor for around $200, and sometimes a lot less.  For reading the New York Times, magazines and blogs, I’d love to have a monitor I could hold in my lap and read while sitting in my La-Z-Boy.  A 10-12” screen would probably be ideal, but it must be thin and very light.  It doesn’t need to be a computer, but just a reader, maybe just a portable Acrobat reader.  And I don’t want to pay more than the cost of a monitor to have a monitor I can hold in my lap to read.

I’m not sure I’d even want video and music from such a device, especially if it will raise the price significantly.  I just want to read what I normally sit at the computer and read, but in a comfortable chair.  My Zune, iPod Nano and Sansa Clip are perfect for audiobooks and music.  My iPod touch mostly goes untouched.  My netbook mostly goes untouched.  I just don’t do that much on the go computing.

The iPhone was brilliant.  The iPod was brilliant.  Do we really need the iTablet?  How many more useful devices can we use?  Steve Jobs does have an amazing track record of creating devices we didn’t have before but can’t live without now:  Apple II, Mac, iPod and iPhone.  But I prefer a PC to a Mac.  The Sansa Clip is easier to carry than my iPod Nano or touch, and even though I’d love an iPhone I won’t spend the money.  The $64,000 question is whether or not Steve Jobs will announce something I will run out and buy.  I’d own a Mac if they were cheaper, so I’m guessing I’ll be waiting on the HP tablet computer.

JWH – 1/7/10

Sherlock Holmes and Other Modern Myths

There are some fictional characters that have achieved a kind of immortality outside of the stories from where they were conceived, and they get interpreted over and over again in new books, television shows, plays and movies.  These include Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Tarzan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Frankenstein, Superman, James Bond, and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the March sisters (aka Little Women), and so on.  The list is surprisingly short compared to the millions of books that have been published.  And it’s fascinating to note the fading of some of these characters, like Nick and Nora Charles, Dick Tracy, Perry Mason, etc.

One way to understand fictional immortality is to study how various Shakespeare’s plays have been in and out of fashion over the last four hundred years.  We like to assume we’re getting the true Shakespeare when we read the plays, but are we?  Read a play and then watch it performed.  It comes to life with actor’s performances and the director’s interpretation.  I have read that Shakespeare changes with the generations and centuries. 

Another specific way to see mythmaking in action is to study Wyatt Earp.  Sometimes a famous fictional character is based on a real human.  Read a handful of Earp biographies and then watch several of the dozens of movies based on the Earp myth, especially the films with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell.  You’ll begin to see how myths are created.  Absolute facts don’t count, but the defining of a Platonic Form that makes the character recognizable no matter when and where he or she appears and in what guise.  Wyatt Earp is still Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, even only a damn few facts remain.  That’s the power of myth.

Many people hate when their favorite book is made into a movie because the filmmaker’s interpretation of their beloved character is different from how they brought the character to life in their mind.  But everyone’s mental interpretation is different, so I don’t criticize movies for seeing characters different.  In fact, I love seeing multiple interpretations, especially when moviemakers are trying to be faithful to the original story, or trying to tell the original story in a modern setting.  I love when actors inhabit a character and make them come to life.  I’m critical when a writer uses an iconic character for a stock performance, especially when they obviously don’t strive to add life to the character.

I found one source that said Sherlock Holmes has been played by 75 actors in 211 films, but it was dated 2005, so we know it’s at least 76 and 212 now, if not a good deal more.  Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring the detective adventures of Sherlock Holmes, so there’s a wealth of literary history from which to define the Holmes mythology.  And I think that’s what’s happening, our popular culture is giving life to modern myths.  I wonder if this is how the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans gave life to their gods?  We only see faint shadows of those ancient individuals today, and have no idea what their fully empowered identities were like.

Sherlock Holmes has been around since 1887, and Wikipedia has a fascinating summary about Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, which also backs up many of the details in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey, Jr. interpretation of the cerebral sleuth.  I am not a rabid aficionado of Sherlock Holmes – I’ve read some of the original short stories and seen many different Holmes movies over the years, so I can’t accurately judge how Guy Ritchie treats the canon, but read Tom Richmond for a true fan’s view. 

People who haven’t read Sherlock Holmes stories, or even seen any of the older Sherlock Holmes films will have a virgin impression of Holmes, and that’s fascinating by itself.  If they are now inspired to read the stories or watch older interpretations they might be shocked and dislike the non-Robert Downey versions.  Often filmgoers and readers imprint with the first encounter with a characterization, like ducklings to their mother, and find reasons to dislike any other performance.  I think this is especially true of Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy.  For baby boomers and older folk, Basil Rathbone is the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes.  Such bonding is unfortunate because it restricts the evolution of the mythic character.  Often the character must be reinvented for each generation.

I hope I live long enough to see the Harry Potter books get made into a second set of films – to be epic mythic a character needs to have been in dozens of films.  Not that I don’t like the first productions, but I’m anxious to see new interpretations.  I suppose this is why there are nearly a half a million fan-fiction retellings of the Harry Potter stories.  I was very excited to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie hoping it would instill new life into the fading Baker Street citizens, and acquire a new generation of believers for the Holmes mythology. 

But here’s my problem, even though I can buy Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes, and especially Jude Law as Watson, and love Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, I’m not sure I can buy the plot of the new movie as a standard Sherlock Holmes story.  While watching the film I predicted how it would wrap up and I was satisfied with the direction the writers took, but think Ritchie went too overboard with the violence, explosions and especially the scene at the shipyard.  I absolute adored the recreation of Victorian London.  I would have been happy if the only action had been Holmes and Watson strolling for two hours around town and just chatted.

I bet the Sherlock Holmes virgins had a far more exciting time watching the new film than most of us older fans because they weren’t burden with worrying if the story disrupted the canon.  Besides the first time is always the most memorable.  Many Pride and Prejudice faithful can’t stand any of the film versions because they want to adhere to the purity of the novel, knowing any aspect of a film version can drown out content from the original story.  Most people will always think of Tarzan as Johnny Weissmuller even though the original 26 Edgar Rice Burroughs books describes Tarzan very differently.  I’m sure there are lots of kids that have never read the Harry Potter books but worship the films and they would be shocked to discover a very different Harry Potter described by his creator J. K. Rowling.

But I don’t think any of this matters.  Everyone can tell a cat from all other animals even though they come in an endless variety of appearances.  There seems to be an indescribable natural form that is the cat ideal.  You can always spot a Tarzan in any TV show, movie, book, comic, video game, cartoon, or other fictional venue.  Ditto for Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge and Frankenstein.  In popular culture this is also becoming true for Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, but isn’t as widespread as those already mentioned.  I think the March sisters from Little Women have potential to evolve into 21st century famous fictional pop culture identities.  They were major in the 19th century, and they maintained their fame since at a steady low level, but I sense a new surge.  Pop culture prefers flesh and blood people to make famous, but it’s fascinating to see word and sentence people gain worldwide fame.

It will be fascinating to know if Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan, or even Harry Potter continue to exist one hundred, two hundred or a thousand years from now.  Isis and Osiris are still around, but how many average kids know who they are.  How many kids even know Odysseus or Gilgamesh.

JWH – 1/6/10

Avatar

First off, let me say I loved seeing Avatar, and want to go see it again.  Second, this is not a review, but a dissection of the movie and it has spoilers, so don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.  Avatar represents state of the art movie making and proves computer technology can turn any imagined story into a film.  I agree with the majority of reviewers that have said “Wow” to the special effects and then mumbled some grumbles.  The story retraces Dancing with Wolves, but the filmmaking blazes new territory.

However much I loved watching Avatar, I have one really big gripe:  I hate that humans are presented as stupid, cruel and blood-thirsty.  Why does Avatar portray future homo sapiens as 19th century colonial ravagers? Star Trek came up with the Prime Directive back in 1966, so why does this futuristic flick predict mankind as idiot imperialists?  I asked my friends about this and they defend the movie by saying “Oh, the film is just a liberal metaphor for how corporations and people treat the environment.”  But I can’t imagine James Cameron ruining the most expensive piece of art in history with such a crude message.  I can’t but wonder if Cameron thought the “kill them all and let God sort them out” mentality is how the majority of moviegoers want the majority of men and women characterized.  Why aren’t viewers insulted by seeing ourselves shown in such a nasty light?  Or are people sitting in their chairs thinking, that’s not how I am, I’d be one of the good scientists, but all the people around me must be like those blood-thirsty killers of the poor Na’vi. 

The film imagines technology evolving, but shows men and women devolving from our present knowledge.   Cameron presents the military as disciples of General George Armstrong Custer.  I’m surprised Colonel Miles Quaritch didn’t go around saying “The only good Na’vi is a dead Na’vi.”  Sure the solders in Avatar are passed off as private security, so as not to insult the U.S. military, but they think of themselves as Marines – thus it still attacks a stereotype.  And I worry that international film goers will naturally accept the bad humans, and especially the military in this film, as representing typical Americans and typical American thinking and philosophy.  If the Na’vi had been the bugs of Starship Troopers, I would have been pumped up by the military might of the story too.  We are a violent nation, but it’s important to know when violence isn’t the solution.  Strangely I think our real military knows that better than we do, or movie makers.

Why did Cameron spend so much money making such a cliché story?  It’s Starship Troopers at the Little Big Horn.  Sure, I can picture the story as a metaphor for how we’re destroying the Earth and its indigenous people and life forms, but that analogy is too crude to work.  How many filmgoers leave the theater thinking about how we’re destroying the rain forest?  Or does Cameron think we’re all spectators at the Coliseum, just sitting in front of his spectacle to get pumped up over a simple action picture show – hey the white hats win in the end, but we’re not wearing them.

Also, it’s time for film makes to stop relying on cliché science fiction.  The humans and the military in Avatar could have come from the same generic Sci-Fi reality as Starship Troopers, Aliens, and countless other SF movies and TV shows.  When are science fiction movie makers going to evolve and create more realistic science fiction? 

I would have been more impressed if Cameron had made almost the same movie but with a different opening premise.  Start with a generation ship that has traveled for three hundred years, finally reaching its destination, Pandora, with interstellar colonists.  The human space travelers must colonize or die.  They must find acceptance in a harsh new world, so instead of Custer’s Last Stand, they must be Jamestown and struggle to share a new world with equally intelligent creatures, and this time not follow the same path as we did with the Native Americans.  The colonists could use the same avatar technology to communicate with the Na’vi – what a fantastic first contact way to communicate.

I’m tired of science fiction films having comic book level violence.  The world is not Tom and Jerry, or Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.  Also unbelievably silly, is to think that anything in existence would be valuable to mine at interstellar distances.  This is pretty much basing a plot on the Santa Claus principle.  Why aren’t science fiction fans enraged at this kind of Easter Bunny thinking about the future?  If Avatar had been made in 1955 I could forgive the story, but the world has gone through a lot of enlightenment since then.

I’m sure James Cameron assumed we’d go through some catharsis of guilt and hate ourselves for being so evil.  I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being the bad guy.  I know humanity has been evil in its treatment of the Earth.  It’s time to go past that and change.  Science fiction needs to show us evolving, and becoming wiser in the future.  Science fiction needs to show who we should aspire to be, rather than make us hate who we are.

Avatar is too beautiful to hate.  It is stunning to see.  It immerses us into an alien world better than any other science fiction film.  I just wished it didn’t have such a cliché plot.  Avatar proves that just about any science fiction or fantasy novel could be made into a film.  I’m tired of movie makers thinking the only science fictional conflict worth filming is human versus alien death matches.  What great science fiction book would you love to see filmed with the same technology as Avatar?  The first one that comes to mind for me is Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

JWH – 1/4/10

2010 Pub Challenge

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The 2010 Pub Challenge is about reading 10 books published in 2010.  Follow the link to the official home page of the challenge to read the rules and how to sign up.  Even before I discovered this reading challenge, I had made a new years resolution to read 10-12 books in 2010 that had been published in 2010.  I have discovered that my reading feels more exciting when I mix in a good many new books.  But this challenge presents another challenge:  How to find the best books of 2010 before the end of the year when everyone publishes their Best of 2010 reviews?

The only solution I can think of is to read as many book reviews as possible and see if I can spot titles with several consistent rave reviews.  Bookmarks Magazine does just this, but unfortunately, I’ve sworn off buying paper magazines, but they do have a links page to many current book reviews.

What I’ve decided to do is collect links on this page to the best online book reviews I can find.  Hopefully this will help me spot the emerging best books of 2010.  I also create another list, one for books I want to keep an eye on.  Working on this 2010 goal is actually helping me achieve a long term goal I’ve been thinking about for years.  I’ve always wanted to find a way to systematically read book reviews.  Even if I don’t have time to read all the books I want, I’d like to at least be aware of what’s out there.  Assembling this list below has been very rewarding already.

Best Book Review Sites

2010 Books to Keep an Eye On

 

JWH – 1/2/10

SuperBookworms and Reading Challenges

I wrote about my discovery of SuperBookworms at the end of 2007.  I was in awe of Eva who read over 200 books that year.  Well, this year she’s read over 400!  And she’s not just reading little escapist genre novels, but mostly a diet of big meaty literary books, and she follows up her reading by writing long elegant and educational reviews.  If you love to read you will find Eva’s blog a total inspiration.  Eva is part of an Internet sub-culture of online bookworm bloggers.  These people love books and reading, and they inspire each other to read more by proposing reading challenges.  A reading challenge works to get people to read a certain type of book, or a certain number of books.  Here are some examples of 2010 reading challenges:

There’s even a blog about reading challenges, A Novel Challenge.  Each of these sites will set up the rules for the challenge, and many of them will ask you to register – all this means is your name (real or imaginary) and blog URL gets added to a public list of people joining the challenge.  That way other people can go check what you’re reading.  You can link to your blog’s home page, or to a page created just for the challenge.  Most sites that host a challenge also create a challenge logo with link that you can place on your blog to help advertize the challenge.  Some challenges get 100-200 readers.

If you love discussing books, a reading challenge is merely an informal online book club.  There’s no real obligation.  It’s a great way to find new books and meet likeminded bookworms.  And some of these bookworms are super bookworms, which I’ve define as bookworms who read over a hundred books a year.  I’ve never found anyone who has read as much as Eva read this year, but it’s not uncommon to find readers who read 100-200 books a year, and pretty easy to find a handful of readers who read more than 200 books in a year.  I once read 478 books in 18 months, but I was a college dropout at the time, avoiding work, and they were mostly little science fiction paperbacks. 

I’m lucky to finish 40-50 books a year.  I aim for 52 a year, or one book a week, but in recent years I haven’t even made that goal.  I don’t think my mind could handle 400+ books like Eva reads – that’s just too much for me to think about.  Eva has health problems and reading is a relief for her, but her mind is far sharper than mine, and can digest and process vast quantities of words.  I can’t, even though I wish I could.  I mentally move like a sloth compared to Eva’s hummingbird speed thinking.  I would love to read and review more books but there are physical limits for everyone, and I’ve long discovered my limits.

Because of my reading limitations, I’ve decided to improve my bookworm life from another angle of attack.  I want to read fewer books, but find intensely great books to read.  I have three reading goals for 2010.  First I want to read 10-12 books published in 2010, and hopeful find books that will be on the best of the year lists at the end of 2010.  Second, I want to read another 10-12 classics that are memorable across the ages.  Finally, I want to read 10-12 books off my bookshelf – I have hundreds of unread books that I couldn’t wait to read them when I bought them, but have been neglected ever since.

I was very disappointed in my 2009 year of reading. I want to make 2010 a standout year.  Since 2002, I felt I’ve been going through a reading renaissance, but things got stale last year.  This past decade was the most exciting time for reading since I became a bookworm in my youth.  Reading excitement fell off after my early college years, and it wasn’t until I discovered audiobooks in 2002 that reading got exciting again like it had been in my teen years.  I don’t want to lose that thrill, but I think it will take concentrated work.

What’s really sad is I have so many great books on my bookshelves going unread.  I took five minutes and grabbed all the books that made my heart ache that I didn’t read this year.  I should give these top considerations for 2010.  I could have grabbed ten times more.  I’ve got to stop buying books if I can’t find the time to read them.  Here is my personal reading challenge – finish 10 of these books before I write my reading roundup one year from now:

  1. The Book Nobody Read: In Pursuit of the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus – Owen Gingerich
  2. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism – Ross King
  3. H. G.: The History of Mr. Wells – Michael Foot
  4. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World – Jenny Uglow
  5. A Long Fatal Love Chase – Louisa May Alcott
  6. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
  7. Emotional Intelligence:  Why it Can Matter More than IQ – Daniel Goleman
  8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Society – Jared Diamond
  9. Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe – Simon Singh
  10. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
  11. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions – Lisa Randall
  12. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – Erich Auerbach
  13. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe – Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee
  14. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science – Richard Holmes
  15. Stories of your Life and Others – Ted Chiang
  16. The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture – James Burke and Robert Ornstein
  17. Body and Soul: The Making of American Modernism: Art, Music and Literature in the Jazz Age 1919-1926 – Robert M. Crunden

If I finish any of these books, I’ll write a review and make a link of the title.  Just creating this personal challenge makes me feel excited about 2010.

JWH – 1/1/10