Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner bookstore as a young woman.
“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
I used to hang out in bookstores and buy piles of books. Nowadays, I hang out of the internet, and though I read many, many hours a day, it's mostly on the computer screen. When I've had enough screen time, I like to listen to audiobooks. There are 27 audiobooks in my iPhone at the moment. But I do occasionally choose to have my reading in old-fashioned book form. This year, of the few books I bought, one was "Just Kids."
I'm not really into the romanticism of the physical object that is the book. I think the internet is more beautiful than a book. But is the internet "in our material world"?
In a story about how "picture books" don't sell anymore, Amanda Gignac, "a stay-at-home mother in San Antonio who writes The Zen Leaf, a book blog," is quoted saying that about her 6 ½-year-old son, Laurence, who "started reading chapter books when he was 4... regularly tackles 80-page chapter books, [but] is still a 'reluctant reader.'"
***
Remember when progressives fought againstchild labor?
Argues Lorrie Moore (who's not saluting but having trouble keeping the light out of her eyes):
I love the idea that what we want from reading is to intertwine our minds with the mind of another human being and I understand why Moore connects that to freedom from commerce and why she find that purity in fiction. The funny thing is to want to write when you don't want to sell anything — even any ideas. It's not always true of fiction and not only true of fiction, but it is what we really want to read, isn't it?
I'm wondering, after reading this hyperventilation in the always-awful "On Faith" section of the Washington Post. The author is Gustav Niebuhr:
In the United States, short of causing arson, you can burn a book, just as you can America's most sacred symbol, the U.S. flag. It's Constitutionally guaranteed. Free speech.
The moral question here is, how do we handle our freedom, which permits us appalling, anti-social acts?
As an American who deeply believes in free speech, I regard burning a book as a nearly unspeakably terrible thing. It is an assault on knowledge, and the societal value of allowing people to read and decide for themselves whether what they read has meaning to them. Torch a book and you at least symbolically deny your fellow men and women that freedom.
What's more, you replicate images of a political brutality--book burnings in Germany in the 1930s--that will haunt our planet for generations to come.
Good lord. There's an immense difference between burning your own book as a way of saying "I hate this book" — which adds more expression to the marketplace of ideas — and the confiscation and destruction of other people's books — which is about depriving people of access to expression that they want to consume.
It's offensive to say "I hate this book" about a book that some people revere, but that's the point. It's a vigorous, vicious expression. Burning your own copy of a book is the same thing. Unless you possess the only copy of the book — or, perhaps, an artistically or historically distinctive copy — the burning is just a way of being showily expressive and getting a big audience. It's absurd that any clown who wants attention can light a tiny fire and become world famous. Get a grip, people.
I find it hard to believe that Niebuhr and hyperventilators like him are big readers of important books, because their minds seem pretty feeble to me. "Torch a book and you at least symbolically deny your fellow men and women that freedom." At least symbolically. Or, to put it another way, i.e., truthfully: You don't deny other people anything. You give them something: the information that is your hatred of a book. And as they "decide for themselves whether what they read has meaning," they can take into account that you hate the book. It's not going to be a very influential piece of information, because you're just some attention whore who burned a book instead of articulating a pithy critique of it.
Yes, conceivably, a private group burning its own books might be intimidating, but that would only be because we have other, much greater reasons to fear that group or the movement it represents. And yes, when you burn a book, you adopt an image associated with the Nazis, but that marginalizes you. We don't cower every time some marginal idiot draws a swastika or does the Hitler salute. You're free to express yourself, but I think lavishing outrage on some nobody empowers him. Why not ignore what is worthless? It's a marketplace of ideas. Why are you even browsing the crap?
This is either the getting of wisdom — or the gradual shutting down of (what to call it?) one’s social and engagement functions as one gets closer to in-turnedness of dying, the inability of the aging to take in new stuff because we are too occupied trying to process the accumulation of the previous decades.
In the near future world of Super Sad True Love Story, books are called “media artifacts” and are regarded as too smelly to own.
When I ask Gary if he is really as pessimistic about the future of books as all that, he proclaims, “Over! So over! Oh my god.” When I point out that there will always be bookish types such as ourselves, he counters, “How many of us will remain? Will there be 3 million of us? Will there be 300,000 of us? Will there be 30,000 of us? How much will it take for me to sustain a living doing what I do best, well, doing the only thing I know how to do? Well, actually, I don’t even know how to read.”
... According to Shteyngart, the bookless future is going to be very “slutty,” which is what he likes about it. It’s going to be great, with see-through jeans, and he can’t wait.
It's not that I am unable to play well with others. It is rather that I have a hard time finding persons who interest me enough to want to be friends. This is, I suppose, what attracted me to books and magazines so many years ago -- the opportunity to be in the company of interesting people with engaging stories to tell.
"The messages happen just by chance. That he is interested in — in creating flesh and blood people to do the — the tragic or the comic things which people do for — for pleasure. That is, I think that one should read for pleasure, that one doesn't necessarily have to read for pleasure, but I myself read for pleasure, not for ideas. That if it's — I've got to hunt around in a book to — looking for an idea, then I'd rather do something else. I'd rather do something that's more fun than that. It won't be reading."
Is that so much harder to understand than "Every toothbrush is in a mug"? It is, for a lot of people. We're talking form here. Grammar. Not why anyone would be putting hamsters in shoes.
The real problem, [the city's animal control] staff said, is hamsters.
People buy the high-strung, nocturnal rodents because they're under the temporary impression that hamsters are cute and cuddly. But the new owners quickly learn that hamsters are, in fact, prone to biting, gnawing through expensive wiring and maniacally racing on their exercise wheels at 2 a.m.
So the animals end up at the shelter. Just about every species has its own rescue group in San Francisco, but no one seems to want hamsters. Hamsters are the No. 1 animal euthanized at the city's shelter, said San Francisco Animal Care and Control director Rebecca Katz.
"It's definitely a concern," she said. "They're an impulse buy, and we do sometimes get tons of them, especially babies."
Ms. Katz is upset about the death of baby hamsters. Presumably, there is also a Ms. Hamsterz who's upset about the death of kittens.
***
I hope you understand this blog post. I know there are a lot of people who don't understand some sentences. Do you understand my sentences? Is it the grammar... or is it something else?
Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did look into Chapman's Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.
You read something quickly. It inspires you to write something quickly and then to get it out instantly to be read. That is blogging, and Keats got as close to that as one could in 1816. But he was reading George Chapman's translation of Homer and writing a sonnet that people will read as long as there are people who can read. That's all very grand, compared to blogging. To counterbalance, the blogger gets the instant writing out to thousands, and Keats only got his poem out instantly to one person.
But would Keats have read Homer and written a timeless sonnet if he could have blogged?
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I read the first 82 pages of Markson's book out loud as Meade drove the TT up to Fish Creek, Wisconsin and back — via Whitefish Dunes — Thursday and Friday. I stopped reading at page 82 last night at about 9 when the last of the daylight failed. The book is composed entirely of snippets like the one quoted above, and if I'd gotten to the next snippet, it would have been:
Fish feel pain.
Ah! The fish theme! How apt!
Actually, I'm lying. Lying out of love of aptness. For your sake, dear Reader. That fish snippet is at the very bottom of page 82. It was the second to the next one. The next one was really:
If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.
Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.
There's another Mozart one that led to some laughter and conversation. On page 21:
I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed.
[T]he English standards do not prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short stories, novels, and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James Thurber’s “The Thirteen Clocks.” One play cited as appropriate for high school students is “Oedipus Rex,” by Sophocles.
Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who was lead writer on the English standards, “Students have to read one Shakespeare play — that’s a requirement.”
You can read the standards here. This document lists the exemplary readings, if you want to see what got singled out. A 9th or 10th grader is expected to understand Shakespeare's Sonnet #73. Ah! If only!
From an essay by Roger Ebert about how the internet rewires our brains. A lot of the essay is about the importance of stepping away from the computer and reading our way through actual books — long books that you read straight through in a linear fashion (which ends up being long novels, which just happen to be something he loves doing anyway). But I was struck by the Facebook/Twitter point. We spend a lot of time on the internet, but we do different things here, so it's not just a matter of what The Internet does to our brains.
In fact, Reading Books isn't just one distinctive activity. Ebert writes about books as if book = Victorian novel. But some of us like reading nonfiction, including books that don't require linear reading at all. You can dip back and forth in a book and read snippets in very much the same style as web-surfing. When I'm reading books, I like a stack of books of different kinds. I might read a few pages in one, then switch to another, maybe rotate through the whole pile, very similar to the way I'd open up a set of tabs in my browser and cycle through them. And I like reference books and essay collections — e.g., a collection of movie reviews — that are best read by jumping around.
By the same token, on the internet, there are different ways to read. As Ebert's Facebook/Twitter point shows, reading is deeply interwoven with writing and with the feeling of interacting with other people. Sitting by yourself with a long book is quite unnatural by comparison. I think it could be said that the internet takes our urge to read and reintegrates us with society. It's more like the natural world that we evolved to live in: there should be the constant potential for interruptions and distractions; we should be giving and receiving communication to and from other people who are alive now and able to respond to us. In that light, long books distort our brains, and the internet brings us back to human society.
And being on the internet isn't just one distinctive activity. Some people like Facebook and some like Twitter. Me, I love blogging. I've done the other 2, but blogging suits me best — in part because I have so many commenters who come here and make this feel like the lively coffeehouse or salon I always hoped I could find in real life. Ebert says Facebook looks inward, and he prefers Twitter, but isn't it funny that if Facebook is really inward, it's more like the long novels that Ebert uses as an antidote to the internet experience? Ebert twits like mad — his Twitter feed is excellent — but maybe he's using it, in part, as a change of pace from those Victorian novels.
We can, each of us, design our own mix of experiences — in nature, in face-to-face human encounters, with books, with pen and paper, and using computers to read and write. We balance and offset. We seek pleasure and satisfaction and power and wisdom. We begin where we begin. One individual begins with too few real-life friends and a love of thick novels, another begins with a chattering schoolgirl clique and a Facebook page. Add something to that and then to that. Inward, outward/outward, inward. Make life better, in your own way.
The list discussed at the link is all about protecting the delicate sensibilities of novelists. To write, you need a good "ear." (Sorry, that's a metaphor. And a penchant for metaphors is something you might pick up from reading "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.) The problem with reading is that it puts some author's way of saying things in the place in your mind that would otherwise be occupied by the way real human beings speak.
I think you can immunize yourself from the disease of overly influential writers by getting out there in the world listening to people and doing some talking yourself. Have conversations. Listen to other people and watch how they interact with you when you speak. Develop your voice in real life. Even if you don't end up with a good ear and an original writing style, you will have lived and you'll have your friends. Maybe even some stories to tell.
So put down that book...
... and go parading before it's too late.
And stop looking so scornful, it's twisting your face.
Though I bought an iPad as soon as I could, 2 days ago, I'm not going to mindlessly boost the thing, and I'm not going to fool myself about whether it's useful to me. It needs to earn its place in between the fabulously useful laptop and iPhone. Obviously, it's medium size and medium weight. I'm more likely to carry it with me than the laptop, but unlike the iPhone, it's not always going to come along. I can't put it in a pocket or my smallest handbag. And I'm not going to pick it up from my bedside to check the time and a couple websites when I wake up. I'm not going to read it from a completely supine position, as I often do with the iPhone, when I'm in bed and not ready to sit up.
I might use it in bed if I am sitting up, because it turns on instantly and if I'm ready to read but not yet inclined to write. It's very nice for checking email because of the relatively big, bright screen and the way, in landscape mode, I can see the list of email to the left and display any given item on the right. I appreciate that I can lock it into landscape or portrait mode and read while lying on my side. That's something the iPhone won't do. Of course, the iPhone, unlike the iPad, is a phone, and that makes it the one thing I want to have near me all the time.
But most of the time, I'm on the laptop. If I have a table in front of me, I prefer the laptop. Even without a table, I prefer the laptop if I'm going to write. Even though it heats up, I'll have it on my lap while I'm sprawled, half-sitting, on the sofa or in bed. The hinge holding the screen upright and the solid keyboard make it far superior to the iPad for what I want to do.
Maybe I could replace the laptop with a desktop for home use. (I have a desktop in my office, but my home desktop died about a year ago.) The desktop would be better than the laptop for serious writing and working with photographs and video, and then maybe the iPad would insinuate its way into my life as I do things in places in the house away from the desk: at the dining table, in bed, near the TV, on the deck, etc. But I think not. If I'm going to write, and I always feel like I'm about to write, I prefer the laptop.
The iPad might be nice for the simple consumption of movies and books. Or looking through photographs, if you do that. This is especially important if you're away from home, since it's easy to carry and the screen is great. (Note: I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I haven't used it much — and not at all in the past year. I just hate the way the screen looks, with its low-contrast gray-on-gray.) But I'm the restless type. I don't passively consume media for very long. I need to go back and forth between reading and writing, and though it's far easier to write on the iPad than on the iPhone, I'm not going to write on the iPad unless I'm out somewhere and I've left the laptop behind.
Now, I have a special use for the iPad that I'm going to test out today. I have notes for my classes that I keep on iDisk, so that they are saved in one place on line whether I work on them from my laptop or from my desktop. In the past, I have printed out the relevant pages for class. Occasionally, I've just worked from the laptop in class, which is a bit awkward. My primary motivation for buying the iPad was that I pictured myself displaying the relevant pages of notes on a screen that I could lay flat, next to my textbook, during class. I thought this would be extremely convenient.
There's an iDisk app that lets me get to my documents, but the screen image is terrible. It's readable, but not at all crisp. I paid $9.99 for Apple's word processing program Pages, but I can't find a way to work directly with a document saved to iDisk, the way I do on my laptop and desktop. [ADDED: Apple confirms that it can't be done.] I've cut and pasted to get text from one place to another, and I can see that the text would be displayed in high resolution. But that's an extra, annoying step, and it means that if I do any editing, it will not be saved to the iDisk document. Also, I lose important formatting, notably the extra space between paragraphs.
And why am I even using Pages? I prefer Microsoft Word, which I have used on a Mac since 1985. I had version 1.5 of Word, back in the day when you had the program and your documents on a single floppy disk. But Microsoft won't make a Word app for iPad. This is all very annoying. The #1 thing I wanted to do with iPad is not (yet) doable.
IN SHORT: It's a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it's a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.
