My Kindle and Me Revisited

I have been intending to write this post reflecting on my initial Kindle owning comments last August for some time now, as I felt that three weeks' ownership may have been too short a time in which to form solid conclusions about it.

I was initially annoyed that I had not found a book which I enjoyed reading on the device. At first this was down to my poor choices and succumbing to marketing blurb, but discovering that a reader has a week in which to apply for a full refund of their purchase, and finding a book I wanted to read helped matters as far as I was concerned.

At the time I objected to the default font. This is still true, but in the absence of anything more beautiful I have grudgingly come to accept it, and I just hope that future Kindles will have come equipped with an aesthetically pleasing alternative. I also did not like the fact that the reader's progress is measured by a percentage rather than the feel of a stack of pages betwixt left or right hand. I still do not like this, but knowing that most YA novels I read are around 400 pages, I have come to equate 5% remaining to some twenty pages.

As is usual in the twenty-first century, I have therefore adapted my habits to sate technology's restrictions, but it is what technology is able to offer over the codex book that now makes me look for the 'Kindle Edition' links on Amazon.

Not only do I own a Kindle, but I also own an Android tablet and smartphone. Both of these devices have the Kindle app installed. While I do not use it frequently, being able to pick up the book I am reading at home  (after a quick sync) while I am stuck waiting for something is impressive. I know some people carry their Kindle with them at all times, but I am not one of them. I do, however, always have my phone. The usefulness of this app seems massively underrated in the people to whom I have spoken, and it is one of the things that puts technology ahead of its paper counterpart.

Technology also sets itself apart from paper when it comes to reading for academic purposes. Many of my printed books have PostIt notes sticking out of them at all angles to mark passages which I either have, or need to, transcribe to the computer for possible use in my writing. With a Kindle (or the Android apps) it is possible simply to select the text to mark it, and then log into my Amazon account on a computer to access it when it is needed. It is also possible to add annotations, but as I rarely do this in printed books, I have not found the need for its electronic equivalent.

Although seemingly small, these two features afforded the Kindle reader by nature of its medium make it a very different tool for the 'professional' reader as technology is providing something that print cannot.

Six months ago I wrote that I was struggling to build a relationship with my Kindle. I will accept that I have now built a professional relationship with it, and if it was the case that Kindle books were always cheaper than their paper alternative, or that people could buy Kindle books as gifts, the relationship would probably be stronger. But we all know that relationships need to be worked at, and I guess that one challenging a reluctance to pay £4.99 for a text when a 'Like New' copy is available for a penny still needs a little more time.

As a brief postscript, I believe there are some features available to US Kindle users - such as sharing with other users and 'borrowing' texts - which still have to cross the Atlantic and these are likely to make a also likely to make a positive difference when (or if) they arrive on British shores.

A Week in the Life: Monday

Awake at 5.15am and dozing until getting up at 6.55am. Usual term time morning routine and arrive at school at around 8.15am. Worried that the car's engine error light came on during the commute, but as it still seems to drive as normal, I will endeavour not to panic and check it with the diagnostic gadget when I am at home in daylight at some point in the week.

The mouse for the computer in my classroom is not working, but helpful techy solves this so when I get back for registration after daily briefing and catching up with colleagues, it is working. Who needs a wireless mouse, anyway?

8.50am - Registration: Year 12 Tutor Group. Usual notices and quick glance at uniform to check for blatant contraventions of the the dress code (complicated by the fact that as there is snow on the ground, boots are permitted today) and then write e-mails to colleagues on form tutorly matters.

9.15am - Period 1: Year 8 English. Exploring A Midsummer Night's Dream and read the scene of the first appearance of the Mechanicals. Compare their characters to the lovers and Theseus and Hippolyta; show a short DVD about staging the scene and chaos ensues as groups consider and practise their own interpretations and characterisations.

10.35am - Period 2: Year 13 English Literate. We have reached Victorian poets in our chronological ranging through the Literature of Love from 1500 to the present and three students present their ideas about poems in the collection.

11.35am - Period 3: Free. Administrative bits and pieces, catching up with odd bits of marking, GCSE speaking and listening write ups, dealing with responses to earlier form tutor e-mails, and start today's blog (once I have launched my stand alone copy of Chrome as blogger no longer supports IE8).

Lunch is meant to start at 12.35pm, but it was closer to 12.50pm by the time I managed to sit down with a sandwich. 1.15pm and back to the classroom to listen to a Year 11 student give another individual presentation in an attempt to improve on their last attempt.

1.35pm - Period 4: Year 12 English Language and Literature. Starting to look at Alan Bennett's The History Boys so we share background details and information before making a start reading through the play.

2.35pm - Period 5: Year 7 English. We begin with something as old-fashioned as a spelling test and then discuss the final chapter of Michael Morpurgo's Private Peaceful, the morality of shooting soldiers for cowardice, and whether there are any lessons we can learn from Tommo and Charlie's actions and behaviour or the book in general. One student asks whether Private Peaceful is a children's book and I ask what she means by a "children's book": she is sated when her neighbour points out the age range printed above the barcode.

3.45pm is meant to be the end of school, but I choose to stay in school to save an hour driving to and from home and hopefully make profitable use of time before Year 9 parents descend at 7.00pm to help their children choose their GCSE options.

By 4.30pm I have finished the speaking and listening administration, checked a lesson for tomorrow, and written a little more blog before turning to marking GCSE controlled assessments. I realise I have forgotten to see a colleague at the end of school as we agreed, so I belatedly go to see her. We complete the short task and then spend the next twenty minutes chatting.

At 7.00pm, we start waiting for parents to arrive to discuss options for their children for next year and I have marked three controlled assessments. By 9.00pm I have spoken to a handful of parents and endeavoured to explain the differences between English, English Language and English Literature GCSEs. Repeatedly.

Arrive home at 9.25pm and decide to try reading the car's error code. Ironically, the diagnostic tool reports its own error thereby leaving me no better off than earlier. Switching it on and off several times and pressing buttons randomly to try and improve matters all takes about twenty minutes and makes no difference.

Go into the house at 9.45pm and have a couple of slices of toast and do the washing up.

10.00pm, onto the computer to check e-mails, Facebook and Twitter and complete today's blog and at 10.35pm it has to be time to go to bed.

Reading or Studying?

Hearing Susan Hill on BBC Radio 4 this afternoon reminded me of a review of her recent book, A Kind Man, which I read a couple of weeks ago. I do not know the book so cannot make any comment about it, but what I did object to was a remark made by the reviewer:

I’m an admirer of Susan Hill’s work, but I’m not sure what she’s getting here, though I accept this may be my fault, not hers.

The review was written by a Charlotte Moore and published in The Spectator (15 January 2011). Google lists too many Charlotte Moores for me to be certain, but I assume it is the Charlotte Moore who is also an author and writes for the Guardian and Telegraph newspapers.

If it is Moore the writer, such a sop will be – I guess – purely out of self-interest in the hope of a kind word from a writer who struck it lucky with a ghost story nearly thirty years ago. Nevertheless, I find the idea that a reader can see themselves to be at fault for failing to understand what has been written somewhat abhorrent, merely because Hill tells a good tale.

An author is a professional writer. It is their job to be able to communicate their ideas to their reader. Each reader will bring their own understanding to the text and, as any English Literature student will know, their reading is as valid as the next person's. It may be that the reader then chooses to go and research a detail to help explore or develop their interpretation, but this should not be a requirement and they should not feel compelled to do so. Despite not being obliged to do this, I have found a smartphone (with its Internet access) has made the process much easier, and the results can often be fascinating. Indeed, a few years ago I had a lengthy e-mail exchange with a member of the National Gamekeepers Organisation in an attempt to understand why, in two novels by two different authors set in World War I, references are made to dead birds being nailed to posts. (The conclusion we reached was that they were both referring to vermin lines.)

Placing a writer on a pedestal because they ‘must be saying something clever’ is wrong. If, as a reader, you did not ‘get it’, there was probably nothing to get, or the writer did their job clumsily, thereby preventing you from ‘getting it’. Whichever way, it should not be seen as the reader’s fault.

Before I get challenged about my role as a teacher of English Literature, I should stress that I am talking about readers, not students. Studying a text places more demands on the student-reader, and if a text has been chosen to be studied it is probably because someone somewhere feels that it has something to say; it may then be up to the teacher and student to discover what it is. And this is why studying a book can destroy the pleasure of reading it for people.

Read to enjoy reading and find books to study; study to facilitate reading. If the writer is not doing their job properly, a reader can stop reading and a student can explain why.

‘I am wiser than the aged’

I have spent what feels like much of the weekend as part of Lichfield Cathedral’s fund-raising ‘Psalmathon’ which involved the five choirs associated with the Cathedral singing all 150 psalms between Friday and Saturday evenings.

Apart from confirming that any event with the suffix ‘-athon’ is nothing but exhausting, it has introduced me to something new in a familiar setting. Even as a cathedral musician for the past 26 years, I only know about half of the book of psalms: the psalms assigned to each day’s evening worship are old friends, but the morning psalms are the newcomer that everyone regards warily. Discovering the unfamiliar in a familiar context has, for the second time in the past year, caused me to reflect on the impact of psalms on my life.

As a boy chorister, the daily round of psalm singing was part of the job and the strange language and ideas were simply accepted. While the gamut of emotions and events portrayed in the psalms is difficult for a pre-teen to grasp, details did stick out: who were Oreb, Zeb, Zeba and Salmana that princes should aspire to be like? What did God do to the Madianites, Sisera and Jabin at the brook of Kison? Why did the Philistines join Gebal, Ammon, Amalek and Assur at Tyre to help the children of Lot? And all these are just from psalm 83. Many of the names of the people and places are fantastical and would not sound out of place in the worlds of JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling; indeed, the same psalm also includes the Edomites, Ismaelites, Moabites and Hagarenes.

 

As well as providing a rich seam of people and places there is also the inevitable poetry of the psalms. As an adult this is more apparent, but there are images I remember from childhood readings and psalm 55 is one of my clearest memories:

The words of his mouth were softer than butter, having war in his heart:
His words were smoother than oil, and yet be they very swords. 

Even as a youngster, the dichotomy between what one says and does was familiar to me and the simple metaphors make a clear image. Although I can now identify and comment on the poetic devices in the texts, I was certainly aware of some of the meanings and imagery when I was younger.

Having sung psalms on a daily basis, I have never shirked away from attempting to read English texts. My students shy away from Shakespeare because the language is ‘difficult’ – some even object to the ‘thee’s, ‘thou’s and words ending in ‘-eth’ – but, having been brought up with the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, these have always sat comfortably with me.

There is an absolute maximum of seven hundred child choristers in England in any academic year. Through their singing of the psalms they are – unwittingly, like me – having worlds opened up to them to which many children just do not have access. The regular repetition of poetry, some dating back three thousand years, must influence the linguistic development (and possibly even subconscious ability to appreciate poetry) positively and the psalms could, perhaps, in their own small way be admired as a rare, but precious, gem in the crown of children’s literature.

Haggis and Burns, Fish and Hugh

As a self-confessed foodie – a word surprisingly first used by Graham Greene in the New York Magazine in 1980 – it was delightful that last week was the annual opportunity to indulge in haggis to commemorate Robert Burns’s birthday.

Regardless of having no Scottish ancestry, the idea of eating a particular meal to remember an eighteenth century poet who immortalised the foodstuff in verse is too appealing to miss. While I know little else about Burns (apart from his poem To a Mouse providing the title for Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men), his apostrophic poem Address to a Haggis is a celebration of both food, and its importance to Scottish society.

Where is the English equivalent? I know food is seen throughout literature and I have read some intriguing (and some less so) academic studies on the subject, but I cannot think of any text celebrating English food in such a patriotic way. While opinion is divided over the national food – is it fish and chips, roast beef, the fry-up, or chicken tikka masala? – no writing seems to have captured the public’s imagination in such a way as Burns. Or possibly, it could be the lack of interest in literature. Burns’ night celebrates a poet and, apart from the RSC’s local celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon in April, England has not chosen a writer to remember as Scotland has adopted Burns.

The other glorious thing about haggis is its ingredients. My supplier uses a mix of lambs’ lungs and liver (eschewing the oft-included heart) and oats and while the ingredients do not necessarily have the enticing ring of most people’s shopping lists, I have yet to serve it to someone who has not enjoyed it; three of my twenty-one diners had not had haggis before and all had their preconceptions pleasingly dashed.

Haggis is made of the bits of the animal that the poor were obliged to eat centuries ago (the first written record of ‘hagws’ is a fifteenth century cookbook), but in doing so, little of the animal was wasted. I have just caught up with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recent series of programmes bringing the issue of discards to the public’s attention. The problem is that for conservation reasons, fishermen have a quota for each species of fish they are allowed to catch. If they catch a species which has reached their quota while fishing for another species, they are obliged to throw over-quota fish back into the sea, dead. Figures show about 50 per cent of their catches are wasted in this way. Jeremy Paxman is quoted as saying ‘Humpty Dumpty said that “words mean what I choose them to mean”, but if this policy is ‘conservation’ then I’m the Mad Hatter’: this summarises the issue succinctly.

Haggis is a delicious historical example of preventing food being wasted, and in the twenty-first century it is ridiculous that food is being thrown away when prices are soaring and people are starving. While I did not intend this blog to be political, in the case of Hugh’s Fish Fight I will make an exception.

Tabula rasa

When faced with a blank piece of paper, a blank canvas, a blank sheet of manuscript paper or, most likely in the twenty-first century, a blank space with a cursor flashing expectantly at the left hand side of the screen, the prospect of all the emptiness to be filled is – to me, at least – frightening. I said this to a friend recently who suggested that I should, instead, see it as an opportunity.

I can understand that it is the opportunity to write, draw or compose and the possibilities are therefore endless – and for that we should be pleased – but the question of what to write, draw or compose worries me. Choosing words to fill in blanks, or colouring in a paint-by-numbers or reharmonising a tune all appeal to me as there is a structure in which to work or at least to provide a starting point for my own attempts.

But, when faced with a blank page, I panic.

I admire the discipline of columnists and diarists who have to write a certain number of words each week for publication and this has spurred me to decide to endeavour to write a regular blog post of a fixed length. A ‘blog post’ is a somewhat nebulous term as blogs can – and often do – contain many things, but in the age of the internet it is one which we must use. In using the term I want to see it as an electronic equivalent of a diary or a column which thereby satisfies the part of Wikipedia’s definition of a blog post which includes writing commentaries or descriptions of events.

Having decided I wanted to blog (on the internet word classes seem to be interchangeable) I tried to decide what I should focus on as a subject. I have previously never successfully kept a diary – or blog – or done any regular writing on any topic; however, I realised that I do enjoy using my status updates on Facebook and the ability to post links to newspaper articles as a form of ‘micro-’ (or even ‘nano-’) blogging’. Having been doing this for some three years now, and regularly receiving comments and ‘Likes’ in the process, I feel that the wide range of topics on which I ‘microblog’ are all legitimate topics to include.

It is therefore my intention to write about things I know about and understand: this means that I would hope to write about English (both the language and literature), technology, cathedral music, and food and drink at a bare minimum. However, I do not want to prevent myself from writing about those things which I appreciate and attempt to fathom such as science, or fine art amongst many others. In order to make the whole endeavour manageable both in terms of writing and reading, I have imposed upon myself a limit of 500 carefully selected and judiciously edited words.

And with that, my screen is no longer blank and I look forward to the opportunity to try writing.