Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kindle. Show all posts

Thursday, November 8, 2012

The Society of the Spectacle

I recently re-read The Society of the Spectacle. I read the Knabb translation.

There is a pdf of the book online and physical copies are available. I needed it for my Kindle, however, so I downloaded the HTML, cleaned up the document and converted it to a mobi format.

UPDATE: Notes from the Sinister Quarter has created a superior version of this book. Go and get it from their website.

Below are some interesting quotes I found during this reading:

Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man’s public persona.

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults — people who are masters of their own lives — are in fact nowhere to be found.

Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.

The plain facts of history, however, are that the “Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of the freemen. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won;

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Kindle Surprise

The best thing I've noticed about the Kindle since getting it last week, is the superb dictionary integration. It works better than it does on the iPad version. This is a feature I have wanted to have for years; almost instant look-up of the meaning of a word. Not only that, but if you read in another language, you can install a new dictionary and use that instead. You can also select the definition and save it for later revision.

This is a feature that every operating system should have built-in. One should be able to instantly look-up the meaning of any work at the click of a button. Why OSX and Windows fail to do this, I do not know.

Some new words:

reave v. (past and past participle reft ) [no obj.] ARCHAIC carry out raids in order to plunder. [with obj.] rob (a person or place) of something by force: reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast. [with obj.] steal (something). reaver n.

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hummock n. a hillock or knoll. a hump or ridge in an ice field. NORTH AMERICAN a piece of forested ground rising above a marsh. hummocky adj. mid 16th century (originally in nautical use denoting a small hillock on the coast): of unknown origin.

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broil1 v. [with obj.] NORTH AMERICAN cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct heat. [no obj.] become very hot, especially from the sun: the countryside lay broiling in the sun. late Middle English (also in the sense ‘burn, char’): from Old French bruler ‘to burn’, of unknown origin.

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expostulate v. [no obj.] express strong disapproval or disagreement: he found Fox expostulating with a young man. expostulation n. expostulator n. expostulatory adj. mid 16th century (in the sense ‘demand how or why, state a complaint’): from Latin expostulat- ‘demanded’, from the verb expostulare, from ex- ‘out’ + postulare ‘demand’.

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arabesque n. 1 [BALLET] a posture in which one leg is extended backwards at right angles, the torso bent forwards, and the arms outstretched, one forwards and one backwards. 2 an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in ancient Islamic art: [as modifier] arabesque scrolls. 3 [MUSIC] a passage or composition with fanciful ornamentation of the melody. mid 17th century: from French, from Italian arabesco ‘in the Arabic style’, from arabo ‘Arab’.

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capon n. a castrated domestic cock fattened for eating. caponize (also caponise) v. late Old English: from Old French, based on Latin capo, capon-.

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faugh exclam. expressing disgust: ‘Faugh! This place stinks!’. natural exclamation: first recorded in English in the mid 16th cent.

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embrasure n. an opening in a wall or parapet which is bevelled or splayed out on the inside, typically one around a window or door. embrasured adj. early 18th century: from French, from obsolete embraser (earlier form of ébraser) ‘widen a door or window opening’, of unknown ultimate origin.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Kindle vs iPad vs "real" books

My Kindle arrived yesterday. It's good. Unlike most people who have commented on it, I bought it after getting an iPad. I was so impressed by how easy it was to read with an electronic device that I decided to buy something dedicated to it. It works exactly as expected.

Good things about ePaper devices (Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.) compared with a tablet:
  • Smaller and lighter
  • Battery lasts longer
  • Can read outdoors
  • Better quality screen
Goods things about the iPad, for reading:
  • Big screen, colour and zoom (i.e., I wouldn't use an ePaper device for PDFs)
  • Self lit (good for reading at night without a light)
One stupid thing that both types of devices don't really understand yet is that they're not paper books. e.g., the software is happy to end a page half-way through a sentence. For what purpose? To force me to keep reading? What it should do is end on the last complete sentence that fits on the page. A very minor complaint, however.

It's a new age for books. What will happen:
  • Individual prices will plummet (they're already zero for books out of copyright)
  • You can have any number of books and they take up the same space as one. Actually, the idea of book having/ownership is now completely absurd.
  • Nothing will ever go out of print
  • Quality will replace availability (many, many times I have wanted a book and bought something that wasn't as good because I couldn't find the one I wanted)
  • People will fetishise "physical" books like they do LPs/CDs, DVDs and everything else that becomes immaterial. What they don't understand is that it's not the form that's important, it's particular instances. i.e., The Secret is a shit book no matter how it's read.
Is ePaper the coming communist revolution? Unfortunately, no. It's just nice to be able to stop collecting another type of thing.