After the post about focus, a very thoughtful friend and reader got me the book Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It’s about something closely related. Based on interviews with thousands of people, it examines what came to be named the flow state, the “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

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When I was small I hid books under the covers. I read them furtively from the light that reached into my bedroom from the hallway. So I’ve always been a voracious reader.

The past decade has seen me self-inflict great guilt for not reading like I used to. By which I mean I stopped reading as many books. Gradually I realized that I wasn’t actually reading less, I was simply reading differently. Instead of books, I had developed a bottomless hunger for the web, and later, news feeds. I was better informed about current events than I ever had been when I only read one newspaper, and also familiar with a decent stable of niche interests.

A few years later, the inevitable feed purge occurred. You can oversubscribe to news feeds quite easily, and the mail-inbox metaphor that almost all feed readers use transmits a sense that you have to read everything. Consequently you gradually build up an impractical amount of feeds, and an unnecessary feeling of obligation . One day I found myself spending an hour after work trying to get through everything, and realized the mental trap I had fallen into.

I also had come to realize that the weighting of web / news content to long form (books) had to be corrected.

Now, my reading ecosystem seems balanced, efficient and pleasant. It would seem so exotic to my younger self: the magic book that contains all books. The books transmuting into different forms. The instant access to so many sources. But it’s really just a series of tools.

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It’s been a month since I got the Kindle 2 and I’ve now read a few hundred of what we used to call ‘pages’ on it – apparently now you call them ‘locations’. So I thought it would be worth reporting back in.

Again, I was thankful every day for the slim size of this thing compared to the monstrous hardcover it immediately replaced. The next bonus was that I was carrying essentially as many books as I wanted at the same time. I don’t often feel the need to reread part of King Lear, but I suppose now I can. It would be very nice for frequent travelers – if they let you bring it on the plane I guess.

The screen: beautiful and far superior to reading off a backlit screen OR from a cheap paperback, but not superior to a nicely-printed hardcover. Also, the fixed font still seems restrictive.

The wireless capabilities of the device are mostly liabilities in Canada. The coolest wireless features (email your kindle documents, surf the web, auto-grab news feeds) are not available here, so you’re really only using wireless if you want to buy books from the kindle, or if you’re syncing your last-read position with the iPhone app (which is now available outside the US, BTW, and is awesome). For that, you get a pretty substantial battery drain – at least two weeks with wireless off turns into only a few days with wireless on. So I’ve taken to only turning it on when needed.

I have found Calibre to be quite cool. OK, it needs an interfacelift – it has the rugged bad looks of a java app. Also, it’s pretty slow. But feature-wise it impresses. You can convert pretty much any source (rtf, lit, pdf, doc etc.) to kindle format. It has a bunch of free news feeds pre-set up, including many newspaper sites. On your kindle, these look remarkably like the official newspapers you would pay $15/month to receive automatic, battery-killing wireless delivery thereof.

The two cool things I have to mention: one is instapaper’s kindle export. The auto-email to kindle doesn’t work here, but you can manually export your instapaper articles all at once and drag them onto the Kindle USB-stylee. Talk about “read later”, and in style. The other thing is I came upon the link to Annabel Scheme the other day, a novella with a free ebook version. It’s PDF which works on the kindle reasonably well, and the story is GREAT. I honestly wouldn’t have read 128 pages of PDF from my computer screen. That makes me think of a glorious world where I’m grabbing juicy morsels of lesser-known yet tasty author-fruit from the low-hanging boughs of the intertree, and slurping them down in e-ink luxuriousness, and some of the promise of said intertree becomes a little more real as its fruit gets more pleasant to consume.

There’s something very retro futuristic about the Kindle right now. Any black & white e-reader, really – under the shadow of the almost assuredly upcoming Apple tablet, or even of near-future advances in e-ink screens (colour screens, touch screens, combo OLED & e-ink screens), the objects seem, despite the permanence of the ink on screen, even more fleeting than gadgets normally are.

That said, I’ve found I’ve read a lot more since getting the Kindle. This could be a passing fancy, and perhaps the reading will subside once a shiny new gadget comes along (or Mass Effect 2 comes out), but for now, I can’t complain.

I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. It was an extremely generous birthday present from my sisters. I’ve been researching and discussing ebook readers a lot with my pal Ari – it’s a fascinating emerging market. I probably wouldn’t have shelled out the bread for one at the moment, but I’m certainly happy to have one, to learn about its capabilities, and to learn more about the entire field.

The screen is a wonder. It really has to be seen to be believed. When I first looked at it I thought the “plug in the power cable” message and diagram were a sticker on the screen, but no, that’s how things look. Virtuality has never looked so physical. It literally uses no power unless you’re turning the page.

The font is actually really nice – a serif that’s flirting with sans. You can adjust the text size, but not the font, which struck me as odd, if the sort of thing Apple would do, and you sense that this product is very much the result of an emulation of Apple’s attention to design detail.

The interface leaves a lot to be desired. Your instinct is to touch the screen, but no, you’re stuck with a nipply little joystick, a keyboard(!) and a handful of other buttons. The low refresh rate of e-ink displays make it feel klunky no matter what, but that’s one of those tradeoffs that goes with the territory. Luckily, most of the time you’re just going to be pressing ‘next page’, and that works fine.

You can buy books from the Amazon store on the Kindle itself, and as I’m sure you’ve heard, they get zapped near-instantly to the device, thanks to its always-on cell radio or whatever they call it. You can also plug in to your PC via USB and transfer things that way. There’s also a free app called Calibre that can work like iTunes to your Kindle’s iPod, and will also convert files (including Epub, PDF, RTF, HTML) into Kindle-optimized formats.

You can store thousands of books on this thing, so I loaded it up with some public domain Dead White Guy Classics via Feedbooks. Also, my current book is James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, an enormous hardcover that gets tiring to lug around. I had previously downloaded a pirate .rtf ebook of it (which I feel was within my moral rights, doncha think) to try and get it on my iPhone on those days I wanted to carry my camera instead of a half ton of paper, but the document converted poorly. Calibre did a great job and now I can consume hard-boiled political conspiracy fiction in a much lighter package.

Back to that cell network connection. Here’s where things get shady, probably because the towering death lords we call the Canadian telecommunications oligopoly have entered the room. In the US, you can do the following with your Kindle:

• email documents to it
• sync with an iPhone app
• surf the entire web for free

In Canada, you can do none of these things. Also, every transaction has a $2 surcharge added to it, so a $10 new release becomes $12 and a free public domain book becomes $2. I think what is happening is that Kindle doesn’t yet have a deal with Rogers, Telus or Bell, so the prices reflect the ludicrous roaming charges that those companies bill to AT&T. No one even knows what network this thing is connecting to – none of the parties involved will talk about it. That suggests negotiations are still ongoing. Be that as it may, the last thing we Canadian nerds needed was another sign of what a technological backwater we have become.

If you were going to hold out for a future, more awesome ebook reader, I can’t say I blame you. It seems like a new one is announced every day (Nook, motherfucker!), and undoubtedly future models will feature touch screens, colour, will fire lasers & brew killer espresso. And in Canada, you may want to wait unil Sauron, Hitler and Emperor Palpatine (or whomever manages the affairs of our telecom providers) allow the device to reach its true potential.

Regardless, right now, the experience of reading on this thing is quite pleasant, as is the slim size, and the generous storage. It’s the Tardis for book nerds, and I’m definitely happy with it so far.

“Buddha” is equal parts biography, analysis of myth, and historical contextualization. The first two go hand in hand – as with Jesus, none of the source literature about the Buddha was written when he was alive, and over the years much mytholigical sediment has accrued, not least because no one was really in the business of providing a historical biography. They were interested in selling a religion. Armstrong keeps both balls in the air through the course of the book, to great effect.

The historical context, however, was the most interesting. As little as I knew about the Buddha going into this book, I knew even less about Northern India, c. 500 BC. Armstrong situates it in The Axial Age, a time of great social upheaval and multiple revolutions in thought, in multiple regions across the world. The Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Zarathustra are idiomatic, but it also includes Plato, “the authors of the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah”. That’s a pretty sweet all-star team you got there.

More specifically, Armstrong’s emphasis on context allows you to see what Buddhism’s innovations actually were. Buddhism is unique amongst today’s religions in its godlesness and emphasis on ‘enlightenment’. That would not have distinguished it from the competition at the time – such concepts come from the contemporaneous yogic tradition. The innovation was the concept of the ‘middle way’, which was essentially “not too hedonist, not too puritan.” The notion of the non-existence of the atman (self, ego) is the other key new thought that I can’t say I’ve totally got my (selfish, egomaniac) head around.

If you’re at all curious about the origins of Buddhism, the life of Buddha or spirituality in general, I’d heartily recommend this book.

I wanted very much to like this book. I wanted to agree with everything in it. The general thesis is that the corporation’s influence has been so great that our entire society, our culture, our minds are now corporatized – we think like corporations without realizing there are other ways. The hook is almost irresistible, too: Rushkoff was robbed outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and when he posted about it on a neighbourhood mailing list, people wanted him to shut up about it lest he bring their property values down.

The book has many fascinating sections, especially the parts about the origins of corporations, the origin of branding (with Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, although some internetting has me questioning that passage), post-WWII home ownership and racism, and the bias inherent in central currency, to name a few. Unfortunately, all of these are awash in a sea of stream-of-consciousness ranting that makes it hard to discern the overall point at any given time. Certain ideas that need more room to kick their legs,like the bias of currency, simply drown.

Most disappointingly, Rushkoff reserves only a few pages at the end for suggestions of how to counteract corporatism. There’s only one real idea, about establishing local currencies, but as the problem with central currencies was so poorly argued earlier, it fails to impress. Likewise, it’s hard to tell whether his theory of corporatism is at all sound, since Rushkoff’s ranting distracts him from the legwork required to establish the theory’s subcomponents.

Hm. The media diary is getting pretty dull here. Perhaps a daily frequency is overkill. What do I have for ya today? More Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. So I’ve already mentioned that. One thing I like: there’s a title screen for each episode, and on that screen, the episode is labeled either ‘stand alone episode’ or ‘complex episode’, the latter being what we might call a mythology episode. It’s very user-friendly; I’d love it if Fringe had this. There’s always a tension between these two types of episodes, with the standalones favoured by the networks and first-time viewers, and the mythology episodes – the ones that serve the show’s overall story – the choice of faithful viewers and in most cases, the writers. I vastly prefer mythology episodes and don’t much like shows like CSI that are mostly standalones. However, the Ghost in the Shell stand alone episodes are really quite good. They really don’t fuck around with exposition, instead sometimes a character basically ‘briefs’ the audience as to what case they’re following. Then the rest of the ep follows a thriller structure, with a chase or infiltration, and the reveal at the end having to do with a technological possibility you hadn’t imagined before, like the tank whose creator downloaded his brain into it; or the Che Guevara-alike surviving assassination attempts with multiple clones.

I played no games. I read a bit of my book, which is Matter by Iain M. Banks. It’s killing it. His scifi books are swashbuckling space operas; their only ‘flaw’ in the past were that they could take hundreds of pages to get going. This one starts with a couple of battles and keeps the pace up. So far, anyway.

Hm, I’d never heard of this bookstore on Queen West. Worth checking out.

I went, I saw, I so tired!

Toku and I checked out this year’s Ad-Astra in Toronto this weekend and it was so much fun, but so tiring! I’d never been to a Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction Con before and wow, eyes are opened to a whole new sparkling world!

I chatted with so many writer peoples! It was crazy awesome! It definitely made me want to dive into the Toronto book scene and support that community way more than I have been. So bye-bye Chapters, hello Bakka Phonenix. I know that I should have been buying books there since the dawn of my being in Toronto, and I have been once or twice, but I’ve been tremendously silly. No longer! Well, I’ll always be silly but not when it comes to purchasing books of my favourite genre!

We tagged along with friends Lesley Livingston and Adrienne Kress who are two amazing women and also awesome authors. Check them out! I was also at the con with my good friend Jonathan Llyr, who will be popping up in Robot related news very soon (check back here May 1st for all the wild and crazy details).

Anyway, I was mostly talking written word on paper stuffs, but I did have a great conversation on gaming with Brett Alexander Savory. He’s an author, editor, musician, and a hell of a nice guy. He does like dark fantasy, horror fantasy, horror comedy and I guess general horror, but not in the typical “buckets of blood” way. And you can guess what I couldn’t help but ask him about…Yes, Manhunt 2 and censorship! Check out Robot Sounds this week for a bit of that interview and some music from his band (he’s, like, so multi-talented and energetic!) Diablo Red.

Back to the con experience…

I feel so at home with science fiction/fantasy fans! I mean, I don’t dress up or anything (I would possibly under the right conditions though) but the first thing I saw when I walked in the hotel lobby was a group of Klingons and it felt so natural to me. I had to call my sister and leave a message squeaking my delight. I love this stuff! I love that people do this stuff! Just because I don’t (have no courage…) doesn’t mean I don’t think highly of it. And I do, dear gods I do, because it takes bawls and grit to dress up in homage to a show or character you adore and walk around boldly even when in a fandom environment.

Though this con wasn’t so much dressy upy as it was super smarty pants awesome. Everyone was so intelligent and had such wonderful insights on writing, reading, and the sincere loving of both. It just feels good when you are surrounded by people who adore reading the same kind of thing you do. Who understand the love of adventure (and have gone on the same ones) and simply want to talk about how great they are. I mean to be able to say I was madly in love with the Malazan Empire books and see not confusion in the eyes of those speaking to me, but a twinkling understanding and a knowing grin. It was almost like by saying what you read people instantly understood a part of your personality. They could see a glimpse of the colour of your spark and appreciate it. Heady stuff, my friends, supremely heady stuff.

Well, I’m totally knackered from all the interviews, chatting, and general staying up late and getting up early convention styles so I’m off to bed. After this amazingly tiring and fun weekend I can tell that this summer Toronto Conventions + Me = Super Fun Times With No Prisoners Taken.

And I can’t wait!

Go over here and grab a free PDF copy of Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games, “a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.” Cause hey, free book!