Of Phones and Supermen: A Brief Interlude from Wednesday Poetry

Last night, my brother Joe and I were talking on the phone about (here's the jab of postmodern irony) phones. I mentioned my love for those old Nokia clunkers that could do only three things: make calls, send texts, and let you play that really cool game where the snake eats the apples. Joe may have said something about replacing his cell phone with a clay tablet, a stylus, and a pterodactyl. We both agreed, though, that cell phones have created the best of times and the worst of times.

You can contact people easily, but you can't get away from them. You can have your phone with you everywhere (great for emergencies), but people don't understand that there are reasons as to why you're not answering your phone (meetings, conferences, driving, rendered incoherent courtesy of a fever...need I go on?).

Oh, and have we mentioned that there are places cell phones don't work? Such as subway tunnels or random valleys across the Pennsylvania wilds?

Not only that, cell phones have changed the way our culture works, and I thought about this when I read this morning's Pearls before Swine strip (which is the work of Stephan Pastis). Goat says that he misses phone booths, and Rat--always having a snide comment--retorts with a rhetorical question: "Who needs stupid phone booths when everyone has a cell phone?" In the next panel, Goat and Rat glance over their shoulders toward Superman, a single emo tear dangling from his eye as he pulls open his Clark Kent garb to reveal his logo. Rat then says, "Forgot about that guy."

Yes, I understand that the iPhone 4 has come to Verizon, and I'm sure that its successor, the iPhone 5, will allow us to communicate anywhere across time and space, brew fresh tea or coffee on the go, hover over our shoulders and whisper financial advice into our ears, and...well, you get the picture. Regardless, there are some things that phones, despite their seemingly Kryptonian capabilities, cannot do. Walk into a tunnel, lose signal, and your super iPhone becomes a clunky iPod touch.

And besides--enough of our pop culture figures rely on phone booths and their cousins, police boxes, to save the world time and again.

Have a Mac? Catalogue Everything You Own

And I mean quite literally everything.

On Saturday, I was introduced to a marvelous program that's only for Macs. (So everybody who tries to bring Macs down by saying that programs only exist for the PC...well, you chaps are just dead wrong.) This program, the Delicious Library, allows you to hold the UPC code of any item you own up to your iSight camera built into your Mac. The program scans the barcode and then searches the Internet. (Read as: to use the search and look-up function, thou requireth a connection to the Interwebs.) Voila! A database of books, movies, CDs, video games, etc. made with nary a word typed.

There's the option of purchasing a little scanner gun for upwards of $200, but I don't think it's all that difficult to just hold a book in front of my Mac. The program costs $40 on its own, and that's a fantastic deal by itself. The scanner gun looks cool, but the pragmatist in me is wary of purchasing a little gizmo that's only going to be useful for Delicious Library--especially at such a pinch to the wallet.

Also, the Delicious Library has a feature that allows you to "publish" your library listing to the web or to upload the library database to an ftp sight--an ideal way of allowing friends and family know that you already Deep Impact and that--by the 1-star rating you gave it--you have neither the need nor the inclination to own another copy. Except as a very expensive coaster to protect the woodwork of your coffee table. That's a good use for Deep Impact.

Right, going on. For items without barcodes, you can still search or enter by hand. I have a lot of old books, and was able to even find those. But on the barcodes--I must offer a warning. Be careful with mass market paperbacks. Not a single one that I entered came up with the item it should have. I got smutty romances, books on toilet training babies, and occasionally some educational software. These three things do not compete.

The solution? Just search manually by ISBN. No way to fool that, unless you mistype the number.

In the end, for Mac owners, the Delicious Library is a fast and easy way to archive your stuff. And for those of you who aren't running out and buying Delicious Library, stop off at the Mac store on your way home from work, buy a Mac. It'll correct 74.253% of the world's problems. Because it's a Mac.

Don't Shy Away When the Bookbug Bites

So why read. It's a question that I've seen flung around time and again, and particularly--especially in the stodgy academic circles--this has become a question meant to test the resolve, the necessity, of the book.

There are simple answers to "Why read?," which include that the Internet--even with its bevy of webcomics (to which I'm admittedly addicted), YouTube (see comment the previous), and other visual media (Google image search!)--is nonetheless based on words, code, language, and all that stuff. We haven't got to what the Beat novelist William Burroughs had expected: a visual society. You can't think of an image of Big Ben and then have that appear in your image search or as a YouTube video. You have to type "Big Ben" in a search bar and strike enter. (Or click on the "Search" button, but who actually takes the time to drag the mouse point and click--with the notable exception of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail. But it was the '90s. They can be forgiven.)

Words, then, are everywhere, and we're flooded with them. And it's easy to get desensitized in this ocean of language, where things are minimized to quick factoids and reports. So the book...who wants to read after a long day of spending time with words, words, and more words? Why aren't we all singing in time with Eliza Doolittle: "Words, words, I'm sick of words!"?

There's something about books that remind us of what it is to be human. To share something. To connect. And all this talk of the book as just a repository for knowledge...how about as a medium for communicating? I recently came across this NYTimes interview with Charlaine Harris, the author of the book series ported into HBO's True Blood. And some of her answers to the interviewer's questions reminded me of precisely why we read books.

Books make issues personal and connect us to other people. Read the interview, and consider Harris's comments about the sexuality of her characters. Or think about the cult sensation that shows such as True Blood have become. And how these things create conversations. Friends watch the shows and then buy the books and read the books and all the while...they're talking.

So I can't understand why people try to defend the book as some repository of knowledge, some dusty tome that's dry and tedious and dreadfully, dreadfully dull and droll. Let's talk about something that Charlaine Harris apparently knows, that books--regardless of genre, regardless of how intricate or beautifully written--should first and foremost bring people together.

In the words of Stan Lee, "'Nuff said."

Over at the Bucknell University Press...

Howdy, all! If you follow the below link, you'll see a somewhat expanded (and also not written on an iPod) version of my review of the iPod app Manuscript. Just posted this at the Bucknell University Press blog. So take a gander! And if you have an iPod and an interest in writing, check out Manuscript.

Click here to access the Manuscript app review, or click here to see the main page of the Bucknell UP blog!