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The NYPR programme Radiolab broadcast a very good podcast on time perception . It includes the story of a woman with lupus who suffers acute short-term memory loss and as a result is an excellent very long-distance runner. She runs those three-week races through the Arizona desert where you (certainly not I) run for 23 hours and sleep for one hour, or something like that.

Her advantage over other runners is that around the tenth day, they’re not only carrying their backpacks and water but also the weight of the knowledge and resentment that they’ve been running ten days and they must be mad to have thought they ever wanted to and maybe they’d like to stop. The woman with memory loss doesn’t remember how long she’s been running: she simply knows that she needs to run.

(I haven’t listened again to check the details, by the way. Remember what Ondaatje says about novelists needing a bad memory. That’s me.)

Anyway, this story reminds me of the effect of my Kindle on my reading.

I love using my Kindle. It’s funny that the word ‘using’ presented itself to me just then. ‘I like reading from my Kindle’. That sounds odd. You can read a book, but you can’t read a Kindle. The Kindle is merely the technology which transmits words to my brain via the movement of photons bouncing off that pearlised, non-glare screen. Without the text - the author’s ideas and work - it would be nothing.

But without text there’d be nothing to a book, either, except its pages and binding. A ‘book’ in this sense is more accurately called a codex: the technology of binding pages together and giving them a cover. (You can imagine a 3 CE Facebook scroll-status: “Just visited the Oracle. She reckons those clunky square-edged codexes aren’t destined to catch on – says scrolls give you a more flowing sense of the meaning, come closer to emulating life’s cyclic nature, type of thing.”)

We’ve long been used to collapsing the identity of a specific codex, its cover design and typography, together with the ideas, poetry or narrative it contains. A hard-copy book takes on the memories and impressions of its reader. The books on my shelves are bound up with the conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about them, where I acquired them, and my ideas of the person (people?) I was when I first read them.

But I have to admit that the Kindle is making me into a better reader, and for that and the excitement associated with reading, I love it.

Normally I read ludicrously fast (unless it’s non-fiction, or I’m going to review the book or assess a manuscript), absorbing chunks of text for a story-drugged escape and the pay-off. That wouldn’t matter if I only wanted to read for fun, but language and narrative and ideas are how I see the world, and developing my understanding of how they work is vital to what I do.

When I first took possession of my Kindle, I tried reading a few pages of Pride and Prejudice (pre-loaded onto it by the lovely person who gave it to me). The reading felt boggily slow. When I tried to figure out why, I realised that usually I read up and down the page as well as from side to side, and scan across to the facing page to check whether there’s anything more scintillating going on there, skipping to dialogue and action. Sure, call me shallow. Only a love for language and composition and an intense interest in human behaviour has prevented me from becoming a James Patterson or Dan Brown fan.

For those who haven’t yet viewed a Kindle, its screen behaves only a little like a paper page. The lines are much shorter, and in the font size I’m reading at (about 12 point) it fits around 230 words – a couple of meaty paragraphs. I’m currently reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green, and it takes five screens to get through a single page of the edition. Because I see fewer words at a time, I read more meditatively. I’m less distracted, and the ideas seem to sink more deeply into me.

Both The Fabric of the Cosmos and Anna Karenina (my previous Kindle read) are weighty books. I don’t have a good history with weighty books. In a swotty way I like their challenge, but about a third of the way through, I feel the pressure of all those unread pages on my right wrist. The story’s great, I think, but still so far to go. Even if I slog through to the end, my pleasure in the story is diminished because finishing it has begun to feel like a duty.

The Kindle, on the other hand, weighs the same no matter how much I’ve read. It tells me at the bottom of the screen what percentage of the book I’ve finished, and there’s even a little visual indicator (a bar that slowly fills from the left), but that’s more abstract: it doesn’t affect me in the same way as would a bunch of actual paper. As a result, a little like the long-distance runner with memory loss, I focus more closely on the words in front of me and think less about how far I have to go.

I don’t want to do all my reading on a Kindle. Codex-books with their designed covers and tactile pages possess more dimensions and reach more of my senses than the Kindle. They seem imbued with more spirit, feel friendlier – perhaps that’s down to our shared essence of carbon – and are immeasurably more attractive. I’m looking at a collection of spines on my desk that include Further Convictions Pending, Towards Another Summer, Marcus Chown, Wulf, Gifted, Sport 38 and Strange Meetings. It’s soothing and exciting just to run my eyes along them. However, I think everyone who’s watching is agreed that for better or worse, this time round it won’t take several centuries for the balance between old and new technologies to shift.

Susan Pearce is the author of Acts of Love and a number of short stories. She teaches the Short Fiction course for Victoria University Continuing Education and sometimes writes about books and writing at swimmingwithbooks.

Picture via Old Chum.

Sometime last year my dad and I were sitting in the backyard of my old flat in Wellington, drinking cups of tea and sharing our traditional “parents visiting” silence, when suddenly the chair he was sitting on just disintegrated. The wood crumbled, the fabric gave way, and Dad folded up and fell through a hole in the middle where the seat had been. “My god,” he said. He hauled himself out of the hole, a bit breathless, and peered at the pieces of rotten, porous wood and torn vinyl lying on the grass. “Look at that! It’s just completely … gone.” After I’d finished laughing, I wanted to write it down. Not the most sympathetic response, I know. Well, every writer has a chip of ice in his heart.

Here’s my conundrum – I’ll see or hear something I find interesting or peculiar or funny, and I’ll think that the thing holds great creative promise. “Whooee, I’m definitely going to talk about that,” I say to myself. The hands of my brain are rubbing together at this point. Then after a few gung-ho attempts, looking for a home for the thing in the form of a poem or essay or article, I flatline. The bright shard has no apparent connection with anything else. I can’t find any meaning to couch it inside. (As you can see, I’ve cunningly solved the problem of the homeless scene of my dad busting through the chair – it lives on this blog now, so it’s Helen’s responsibility. You’ve got to give it away …)

I’ve been thinking about a book called Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson in which the central argument is that “Eureka!” moments – moments of dazzling, goggle-eyed clarity – do not happen. Johnson argues that you have to stalk those moments, bait them, wire-tap them. I don’t think he’s referring to disintegrating chairs when he talks about the spark: he’s referring more to a sense of connection; the feeling that you’ve discovered the links between seemingly disparate elements, or that you’ve realised the wider significance of a moment. And the spark is also about the excitement of possibility. No matter how quiet and routine a day, there’s always the possibility that a hole in the middle is about to open up and you’ll fall through (see how the chair comes back to resonate there?). You have to keep the proverbial eye out.

Johnson has a basic (I was going to say “helpful”, but one writer’s helpful is another writer’s hamstring) strategy for courting the spark of connection. “I have this Microsoft Word document that I call my spark file,” he says. “I’ve been keeping it for about six years now, and that’s where I write down every little half-baked, quarter-baked idea I have for anything … I spend no time organising it, but I try to reread the entire document once every couple of months.” An idea that once seemed cryptic or lacklustre may unexpectedly gleam weeks or months or years later: “because it connects to something else – and suddenly, it’s ready.”

Incredible: “Suddenly, it’s ready”! Almost without registering it, the simple act of collection becomes an act of creation. In the same way that big discussions and debates and ideas tend to come out of great cities – anywhere a multitude of connections are available – so too does story out of a network of fragments. Maybe the close proximity of elements allows us to better comprehend the possibilities. Johnson has a tidy way of putting it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

The man makes sense! And in some ways I’ve been keeping an ad-hoc spark file for years, too – in notebooks, ancient Word documents, bookmarked pages, emails – and some of the connections I’ve made from these have become pieces of work that, for a time at least, feel meaningful.

But still, the anomalies haunt me.

The other day my brother JP told me about this old song lyric he’d come across. “Do you expect me to just quote King Lear/ While you hit me with your deck-chair?” When I read those lines I really felt like writing something. I thought about what might’ve led to that deranged moment of conflict. The old high-school copy of King Lear strewn on the floor. The expression on the singer’s face when his lover picked up the chair. The deck chair folded up for maximum impact. And I thought about the 18-year-old who wrote those lines. Maybe I should be worried that I found this scene of domestic violence so intriguing. I sat down a wrote a few lines that turned into a sort of terrible poem. In short, nothing good came of it. Many other lines and scenes and characters have failed to connect, have failed to become whole. They’re the lost souls of our manuscripts, trapped in some kind of purgatory.

You could call these things part of “the garbage heap” of experience, as Natalie Goldberg puts it in good old Writing Down the Bones (the garbage heap she describes is really more of a compost pile, where the eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and “old steak bones of our minds” become fertile soil), but I think more than enough analogies have been drawn between composting and experience and the fertile soil coming out of the fingertips etcetera.

Not everything we experience can be part of our work. Some things are homeless. They flicker in and out of view but do not light up what surrounds them. Maybe the trick is to reflect this understanding in what we write – to acknowledge the broken chairs but to not, every time, attempt to rebuild them. (The one my dad fell through – a beloved old red chair from the basement of an early Wellington flat – was irreparable.)

You can read more about Ashleigh here. She is an amazing poet and essayist and now has her own blog. She has appeared here before with a Tuesday Poem.

Money Shot by Rae Armantrout (2011 Weslayan University Press)

When I emailed Rae Armantrout in 2009, desperate to get a copy of her ‘Early Poems’, a book of collected works that was supposed to have been published several months earlier, she seemed gloomy on the other end of the email. She told me the book was unlikely to ever be published. I later found out the publisher was having financial difficulties in what seemed like a depressing symptom of the economic crisis that had just hit. She said she had another collection about to come out through Weslayan University Press. That was ‘Versed’ which I bought and reviewed on my blog shortly after. Six months later it had won the Pulitzer Prize and Rae Armantrout was now a household name, well, in the household of poetry anyway.

Two years on, the book of ‘Early Poems’ still hasn’t arrived and presumably the publishing house has disappeared as so many other businesses around the world have. And since ‘Versed’ America has changed, its economic and moral power has begun to waiver, the dollar has plunged, the country is in heavy debt to China and the wars in the Middle East have become increasingly drawn out and pointless.

In this time Armantrout’s poems have become unsettled and raw, there is an immediacy and frankness that perhaps wasn’t there before. I know some people will be scoff at the word ‘frankness’ to describe Armantrout’s work, which is fair enough in many ways, but it is frankness of emotion I get from Armantrout and that is what lifts her work out of the vast lake of experimental American poetry, the poems’ ability to wear their hearts on their sleeves, yet still remain mysterious and elusive. I guess you could say, they have their sleeves on their hearts.

Her new collection, Money Shot, deals with America’s issues not so much head on like a simple argument for or against, but discreetly, around the back, unable to ‘say’ what they mean other than through the appropriation of language and the brief moments that make up people’s lives. These are poems of the times, but not necessarily about the times.

The lines and stanzas in Money Shot are curt and get to the meat early, as Armantrout is well known for. They mix the language of science, market forces and occasionally, pornography, but it is the human moments that interest the most, they are the cogs that make the parts move in these tiny poetry machines. Armantrout seems aware of this and how easily a poem about finance, science and performance sex can become cold and detached. This is something she seems intent on proving as if to show the economists (and perhaps the pornographers) of the world that people are the valuable ingredient they have overlooked.

The second section of the title poem deals with this expertly as well as her ongoing theme of the things unsaid:

[…]

I’m on a crowded ship

And I’ve been served the wrong breakfast.

This small mound

of soggy dough

is not what I ordered.

“Why don’t you say

What you mean?”

Why don’t I?

Often the poems are like tightly wound springs ready to explode. There is a conscious pressure and feeling of events closing in, a prompt for action, like in Prayers:

[…]

The pressure

in my back

rising to be recognized

as pain.

The blue triangles

on the rug

repeating.

Coming up

a discussion

on the uses

of torture.

The fear

that all this

will end.

The fear

that it won’t.

And there is often a downward gaze, away from these larger issues, a focus on the menial patterns of life, of luxury. The ‘blue triangles’ on a rug and later in Exact, the command to:

quick, before you die,

describe

the exact shade

of this hotel carpet.

In these patterns and the small overlooked details Armantrout seems to be asking questions, not so much of the world or the reader, but of her poems. She wants to understand and the poems are her fingerprint analyses, her DNA tests, the methods find the methods that got us here. And sometimes in the echo of a word or the half-fingerprint of a phrase she manages to say exactly what she means.

Bill Nelson is a poet and blogger. He grew up in South Auckland and now lives in Wellington. He won the Biggs Poetry Prize for best MA poetry portfolio at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009. His writing has appeared in Hue & Cry, Sport, The Lumière Reader, Blackmail Press, 4th Floor and Swamp. He has also guest edited at Turbine and Blackmail Press. You can read his poem 'Giant Steps' on the Best New Zealand Poems 2010 website.

I used to be a devourer of books. Novels, non-fiction, and poetry. There were some on the bookshelf, in my childhood home, but not many, and I remember longing for a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica like the ones that graced the bookshelves of my friends' houses. My mother loved to read novels though, and we'd visit the library weekly, returning with a heavy armful.

Since I had my first child 8 years ago, my reading has considerably waned. It's not so much that I haven't got the time (although that is partly true), but more that I don't have the attention span. The sight of me settled with reading material is enough to prompt all sorts of esoteric questions from the children of the house. By the time I switch on the bedside lamp and pick up my latest book, my eyes start to hurt and the words begin to blur on the page. I tend to read the same page over and over each night before falling asleep. It's a sad situation for a person whose childhood pleasures revolved around a fresh stack of books by the bed each week.

I've found another way to consume words, though, and that's through music. I work from home to the sound of National Radio in the background, but give myself two or three hours to listen to other music during the day. I'm only really interested in music with good lyrics, and these I consume with a passion previously reserved for novel reading. Last winter I discovered Joanna Newsom. Have you heard her three-disc album, Have One on Me? Each track is a miniature world. Press play and you'll find yourself in a gold-rush-era theatre watching Lola Montez performing her famous spider-dance. In another you might accompany Dick Turpin on his way to the gallows, after being charged with horse theft, sometime around 1730. Or perhaps you'd prefer to sink into the comfort that is your childhood home, like a spoon into honey.

While it seems criminal to omit mention of the rich melodies in these songs, to me, the imagery sparkles with clarity. 'My heart made the sound of snow falling on eaves.' (You and Me, Bess.) 'Like a bump on a bump on a log' (Good Intentions Paving Company). 'I swung through here like a brace of jackrabbits with their necks all broke.' (Jackrabbits). 'My heart becomes a drunken runt' (In California.)

It's all rather lush poetry, and is fine company these days.

Melissa writes a beautiful, thoughtful blog called Tiny Happy I urge you to have a read. She writes about her life and craft in a quiet, understated way.