Reading in an Age of Change is a collaboration between Meanjin and Overland, two of Australia’s finest literary journals, that seeks to drive rather than simply react to this debate. Throughout 2010, editors Sophie Cunningham and Jeff Sparrow will host and publish a series of events and articles that tackle the impact of digital media, shifting intellectual property rights and economic change. Speakers and guests involve some of our foremost thinkers from both Australia and overseas, including McKenzie Wark, Chris Meade, Cory Doctorow and Kate Eltham. The project will instigate a broad and varied public conversation on the future of reading, and shed some light on literary culture in years to come.
Find us on Twitter and on Facebook.
With a glut of 4,568 emails, many of which are links emailed from my twitter account for deeper reading, I try to focus on the task at hand. After six months you’d think I’d have lost the fascination. But what I’m learning is too great to ignore. After eight years as a stay-at-home mum, I’m hungering for conversations reminiscent of those had in London when I worked for a woman who played a leading role in shifting attitudes on disability. On Twitter are shares I have not before been privy to in such abundance. The buzz comes from journalists, writers, scientists, visual artists, digital natives and others sharing literature, publishing, innovations, climate change, equality and more. It’s huge. I am gorging.
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Posted at Thursday 22 Dec
by Diane Simonelli.
Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.
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Posted at Thursday 22 Dec
by Catherine Moffatt.
ne of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated ‘grand narratives’, we have been more or less expected to view any attempt at challenging the status quo by either revolutionaries or radical artists as ineffectual and passé. But can the internet, the postmodernist tool par excellence, be used subversively as a means for creating confronting, cutting edge art? Can there be such a thing as a digital avant-garde?
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Posted at Thursday 22 Dec
by Ali Alizadeh.
Prior to the introduction of these digital nasties students had to go to the library, browse catalogues and bibliographies, actually borrow books, read them without the help of a FIND search field and then retype or write the sections they thought relevant to their work. Having to actually locate, touch and work with the physical object that is printed text helped reinforce the idea that each book was the work of some individual(s), belonged to that someone in a moral and economic sense and had to be acknowledged as such.
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Posted at Thursday 22 Dec
by John Weldon.
While it may be uncouth to speak ill of the dead, I would like to begin this blog by citing journalist Tanya Gold’s view of Jobs’ consumer gadgets as objects which, far from revolutionising the world, have simply made it easier for people to ‘routinely ignore each other in public’. The now common pathological indulgence in the virtual stimuli provided ad infinitum via iPhones has made us less connected to our physical environments and has, according to Gold, made it possible for us to ‘communicate [our] indifference better’. If so, could it be said that e-book readers such as iPads, despite their appearance of making books and writing more accessible, have in fact made us more indifferent toward books and have turned us into worse readers?
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Posted at Thursday 22 Dec
by Ali Alizadeh.
An assessment of the impact of the internet on small magazines should begin – and perhaps also end – with the demands and drives that create the thing called literary journal. We must, in other words, consider why literary journals exist in the first place, before ruminating on whether their existence is aided or harmed by the internet.
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Posted at Thursday 06 Oct
by Ali Alizadeh.
I’ve been travelling overseas recently. A good part of travelling and preparing to travel has always been about the book. Of course there are the novels and travel guides read before leaving, but more important are the books to take on the trip.
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Posted at Thursday 06 Oct
by Catherine Moffat.
Amazed? Interested? Gobsmacked? All of the above?I certainly was when I stumbled across images of the Dynabook and references to Alan Kay, its creator, several months ago while researching the history of the future of the book. Questions exploded in my head. How could an idea as potent as this have lain dormant for so long? How come we haven’t heard about the Dynabook-ness of the iPad, the Kindle and the myriad of other tablets out there? Where’s the iPad vs. Dynabook patent battle?
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Posted at Friday 02 Sep
by John Weldon.
For Adrono, the printing press – which ‘inaugurated the bourgeois era’ – is a technological invention that has brutalised ‘the real book’ (by which he most likely means a handwritten copy) by turning the work of literary art into a mass-produced exchange/fetish commodity. If so, one obvious way of restoring the realness of text would be through primitive, ‘barbaric asceticism’ of, for example, spoken word and oral storytelling.
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Posted at Wednesday 24 Aug
by Ali Alizadeh.
I have a dream: to travel the world, visiting its unorthodox bookstores. First stop is a shop on Newtown’s King Street titled Better Read Than Dead. Next is a secret room tucked away in New York that is possibly not secret anymore, thanks to Paris Review and others. Third port of call is The Book Barge, which floats along UK waterways.
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Posted at Wednesday 24 Aug
by Diane Simonelli.
