{"id":2198,"date":"2013-02-25T14:31:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T18:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=2198"},"modified":"2013-02-25T14:33:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T18:33:51","slug":"zachary-bos-on-robert-bringhurst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2013\/02\/25\/zachary-bos-on-robert-bringhurst\/","title":{"rendered":"Zachary Bos on Robert Bringhurst"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Administrative Coordinator of the Core, Zachary Bos, recently wrote a letter to the Boston Finneganers regarding Robert Bringhurst’s books:<\/b><\/p>\n

\n

Dear Friends, and members of the Boston Finneganers:<\/p>\n

I have a great deal of appreciation for Robert Bringhurst’s books —\u00a0his interest and valuation of languages, literatures, and the\u00a0technical means these comes to us; his sense of human and imaginative\u00a0ecology, and of the natural world we humans find ourselves in — and\u00a0I’m sure I’ve shared some of those books with some of you. I’m writing\u00a0now to share with you this pamphlet (attached) of a talk he gave a few\u00a0years ago at RIT, at a symposium on The Future of Reading.<\/p>\n

Relatedly, you might enjoy watching this video of Christopher Ricks\u00a0speaking at a symposium on The Future of the Book held here at BU a\u00a0few years ago, at\u00a0http:\/\/bit.ly\/13K0LMF<\/a>. His remarks\u00a0begin at 67:10; they are largely addressed to comments made by an\u00a0earlier speaker at the same event, James Tracy of Cushing Academy.<\/p>\n

Tracy is the headmaster who supervised the replacement of many\u00a0thousands of print books in his institution’s library with a handful\u00a0of e-reader devices. He explains part of the ambition of this change,\u00a0in response to a question from the audience: “I don’t think that most\u00a0students…. in five or ten years are going to be using printed books,\u00a0for most of their research projects […] In a much larger sense,\u00a0they’re going to come [to college] far more adept than your other\u00a0students [whose experience is with print books] at understanding the\u00a0world that they’re engaged in. I think that will make them\u00a0extraordinarily interesting students. They’ll have interacted on a\u00a0monthly basis with Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners and others\u00a0that we bring to Cushing as part of this program [of updating the\u00a0media resources supporting the education provided by Cushing]. I think\u00a0they’ll be some of your most innovative thinkers who can use your\u00a0electronic technology adeptly.” Now, this is an attitude that\u00a0simultaneously flatters and condescends to students. In the end, it’s\u00a0the students that are hoodwinked. Pardon me for being terrifically\u00a0bored by the prospect of working with a student who has hobnobbed with\u00a0a \u00a0laureate but not traveled widely in books.<\/p>\n

See also:
\n– Boston Globe coverage, “Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the\u00a0books.” (http:\/\/bo.st\/13ilQlr<\/a>)
\n– A debate in the opinion pages of The New York Times, “Do School\u00a0Libraries Need Books?”\u00a0(http:\/\/nyti.ms\/Xx1GjO<\/a>)
\n– NPR, “Digital School Library Leaves Book Stacks Behind”\u00a0(http:\/\/n.pr\/13ilRWw<\/a>)
\n– Libraries Are Obsolete: An Oxford-Style Debate sponsored by Harvard\u00a0Library Strategic Conversations\u00a0(http:\/\/hvrd.me\/13ilStL<\/a>)
\n– Nicholas Carr on “Mr. Tracy’s library”\u00a0(http:\/\/bit.ly\/X6ABV8<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Administrative Coordinator of the Core, Zachary Bos, recently wrote a letter to the Boston Finneganers regarding Robert Bringhurst’s books: Dear Friends, and members of the Boston Finneganers: I have a great deal of appreciation for Robert Bringhurst’s books —\u00a0his interest and valuation of languages, literatures, and the\u00a0technical means these comes to us; his sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[244,477,3857,4261],"tags":[428,44921,4875,2775,44920,44919],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2198"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2200,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198\/revisions\/2200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}