Sherry Chandler

Pocahontas County Fare points the way to this ZAP Reader

a web based speed reading program that will change the way you read on your computer. Current beta testers report reading twice as much in half the time–that’s a 300% increase in reading speed, without any loss in comprehension! There is nothing to install, it works with most popular browsers, and it’s totally free!

So you plug in the text you want to read, or an URL, and it feeds the text back to you one large-type word at a time at a reading speed of 300 words per minute. I just discovered that you can reduce the speed as low as 25 wpm and increase it but I don’t know how fast. I got tired and quit clicking at 1,050 wpm.)

The speed wasn’t a problem but I felt a bit like a harried robot trying to read the text. Impossible for the eye to skim or pick up a whole phrase.

Also I discovered that, if you plug in a blog URL, it’ll read the left sidebar first. Better to cut and paste.

However, as Rebecca points out, it might be a solution to some of the web sites that use odd font faces or blue text on a black background or some such eye straining nonsense.

Plug-ins are available for WordPress blogs, as well as Blogger & Typepad, but I think I’ll wait a while on installing it.

David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”

While it’s true that a half-century ago a galaxy of celebrated Southern writers—Capote, Welty, Faulkner, Williams, Harper Lee, and others—enjoyed cachet in the North; and though once a generation or so along comes a Gone With the Wind or a Cold Mountain, the fate of a writer like Lee Smith remains more typical. Author of the masterly Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith has a large, devoted audience in the Southeast, yet after a dozen novels, her reputation and readership continue to plummet north of Washington, D.C.

Smith’s latest book sets the pattern: Upon its publication in 2006, On Agate Hill, a novel situated in and around Hillsborough, North Carolina, shot to No. 1 on the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance (SIBA) bestseller list and remained there for weeks. During that time, it never appeared on any of the seven other regional lists around the country. By contrast, Anna Quindlen’s concurrently published Rise and Shine, with a Bronx setting, appeared throughout its run in high positions on all eight lists, including SIBA. Both trajectories are typical for established writers from their respective regions: that is, Southern writers are “regional”; Norther writers are “national.” And what’s true of Smith and Quindlen today was also true of Faulkner and Hemingway in their primes.

Why?

Is human experience in the South a specialized and limited affair, relevant only to other Southerners, while life in the Bronx is “universal” and relevant to all, including Southerners? And, if not, what accounts for the confinement of Southern writers to the region?

There may be some conflict of interest in Mr. Payne’s picking Lee Smith as the exemplary novelist for his column. Smith’s husband, Hal Crowther, is also a contributing columnist to The Oxford American. However, I thoroughly agree that Smith is one of the best novelists writing in the United States today and if you haven’t read Fair and Tender Ladies then you’ve missed out.

It also may be true that Smith, along with Ron Rash (another neglected writer mentioned in this column), is operating under the double whammy of being not just Southern, but Southern Appalachian. We all know what exotic inbred creatures dwell in the southern mountains.

Possibly also, compared to a Southern novelist like Cormac McCarthy, Smith suffers from writing of women’s issues—the home and hearth. You’ll find no shoot-outs in Smith’s world.

Besides, as Payne points out, in order to achieve his popularity, McCarthy had to leave the South and begin writing Westerns. Maybe Texas is the one Southern state everybody in the country can identify with?

To return to the Southeast in The Road, McCarthy had to create an area so burnt-out as to make Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea look like a weenie-roast.

Still, it’s an interesting question: why is the Bronx considered more normative for the United States than Hillsborough?