Hauschka & his prepared piano via NPR [VIDEO]

On NPR's All Things Considered this evening there was a fantastic bit about an artist who goes by Hashka & puts a bunch of junk in the grand piano creating fascinating sounds. Amazing stuff. CLICK HERE for the whole story & other videos @ NPR.

Reading & what the world wide interwebs have done to it

I was recently given a Barnes & Noble Nook. It's raised a myriad of questions...

What constitutes a book? Who owns the "book" on my device? What's an eBook "worth"? Shouldn't there be some way for me to get the hard copy books I own onto my device? Will reading on a device have the positive effect on my kids that we know setting an example of reading codex forms of books do? Don't I have an obligation to the environment and to stewardship of the earth to give reading on a device a shot (after about a dozen books the eReader becomes greener, as long as you aren't upgrading devices every year)? And more...

At his blog Scott McKnight discusses the ideas from the book The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. (I checked to see if it was available on the Nook. It is not). McKnight summarizes some of the books thoughts:

The distraction of the internet age is one that seduces us into thinking that we can, if we read more e-mails or more tweets, be in the know or more up-to-date. There is a genine anxiety about not keeping up. 15 years ago we didn’t try to keep up with most of what drives us.


The internet provides mostly information, endless and never-ending. Reading probes into wisdom through reflection. Internet reading is an emotional hit and run; reading a good book, undistracted, for hours at a time digs deeper. There is a difference between an informed brain and a literary brain.


Reading a book well means entering into a history of conversation into which that book fits. The internet is not a conversation but a buzz of information, disconnected and disconnecting.... 

Real reading generates memory because it leads us into the world of an author and a story and a book that is interconnected to other books. Why remember when you can look it up? ...

Internet reading is about being connected; real reading, book reading, means being disconnected and lost in the world of the book.

I certainly feel the anxiety when I am not "keeping up" with the stream of information, whether that's the daily articles in my email inbox or the blogs I read used to read or my twitter feed or the newspaper I try to read on my phone. Distraction. Yeah. That's pretty much the issu...woah...a video of a kitten...

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