Gamer Symphony Orchestra

We went to hear the Gamer Symphony Orchestra on campus last night, a local group that performs classical arrangements of video game theme music. We heard scores from Final Fantasy and Halo among many others. I frankly wasn’t expecting much—basically novelty jingles like “Pac-Man Fever”—but in fact what we heard were sophisticated arrangements that respected the diversity and complexity of this emerging musical genre. Very nicely done. You can hear some samples on their Web site.

The picture below, from one of their rehearsals, testifies to the importance of keeping old platforms alive to inspire new forms of creativity.

Smart Fatigue

On most of the blogs that I read the overwhelming reaction to Amazon’s new Kindle has been snark, ennui, and carping about the DRM.

Sigh. Aren’t us smart kids allowed to get even a little excited about tech anymore?

Remaking Reading: A Response to the NEA's Call for Conversation

I was asked to write a response to the new NEA report To Read or Not to Read for the Chronicle of Higher Education; my piece “How Reading is Being Reimagined” is now online (subscription required) and will be out in the print edition next week.

Here’s a short bit:

[C]learly the report comes to us at a moment when reading and conversations about reading are in a state of flux. It’s worth taking a moment to account for this broader context. High-profile projects like Google’s and new devices like Kindle suggest what I call the remaking of reading, meaning that reading is being both reimagined and re-engineered, made over creatively as well as technologically.

The NEA asks for a serious national conversation about reading, and I see this as my own small contribution. It has nothing to do with refuting or debunking the NEA’s data, which generally seems more careful and less hysterical than the earlier Reading at Risk report; but I do think the context for the discussion needs to be widened, and that’s what I try to do here. The NEA’s findings are an essential starting point, but the conversation is too important to all of us to begin and end there.

The Future of Reading

For the past several months I’ve been traveling and lecturing on “The Remaking of Reading.” This morning I woke up to news of Amazon’s new Kindle device on Slashdot, linking to a cover story in Newsweek. It’s wireless, and also lets you read blogs and other Web content. Jeff Bezos wants to believe it will be the “iPod of reading.”

Hello, research funds. Guess I’m going to get me one.

Tomorrow, meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts is set to release a follow up to its 2004 Reading at Risk report. I spoke to a Washington Post reporter about it this past Friday, so I’m eager to read it in full.