Lanham Dialectical Notebook

I know many people that think that Kindle is death to the physical book and holding the spine of it while reading. Perhaps they need to read this.	So books are not going to die, and neither is the literature contained in them (16).
Indeed! I keep telling my poet friends that refuse to release their chapbooks on e-format that they are taking away readers by doing so.	Writers who decide not to compete in this new market place but to dedicate their text to fixed print only have become the clerks of a historical Mode (17).
I find it ironic that the creator of a work cannot reproduce it for example because of the new format.	I can’t really show them to you, only flat snapshots of a process that occurs in dynamic three-dimensional space (18).
And what would MCloud or Elbow say about the voice of the piece that is newly projected? Does it take away from author intent?	We notice, too, that Professor Minsky is wearing a sport shirt. He talks with a certain accent (19).
This is true. Imagine literature favorites of old in new ways. It could be interesting!	We may respond to the marginal animation in ways text would never elicit (19).
Does this go with trying to make the reader lose their own interpretation, though? Writers don’t want to do that. However, it could be used as framing, too.	Gesture, and the presentation of self of which it forms a central part, constitute an enormous band of our expressive spectrum (20).
Text is the hungry- for-attention middle child at this point. If it’s not classic and not visually vamped, anyway.	Text, I said earlier, seeks to monopolize our attention (21).
It’s not going to work. You can’t close the door that’s already open and exciting for the next generation.	Fixed print designers have recently been trying to map this three dimensional world back onto the two-dimensional page (23).
That’s true. There are word puzzles and reading tricks that prove we are numb to letters and there combinations. But when you change the letters, it becomes a new challenging task just to read. Is this good, though?	The alphabet in digital three-dimensional space returns us to the world Havelock dismissed. It makes us think (27).
See above.	Take a flat letter and revolve it 360 degrees. But why would one want to do this? The very lack of motivation, the playfulness, of the exercise carries a whiff of something in the air (28).
This is just a beautiful and enticing thought meant to be poetry.	As far back as we care to look, letters have always wanted to move (30).
McCloud would love this!	A textual cartoon? (30).
Love the idea that it is the combination of both that keeps us excited.	We cannot exist, after all, only by breathing out abstraction, alphabets which do not think; nor only by breathing in animation, alphabets which do; but only by respiration, the life-giving oscillation of the two.