The day after the day after tomorrow is certainly the last day of the year, and, according to most, the last day of the decade. Because it is fun, this has got people to wonder what the Best (Book/Movie/TV Program/Album) of the arbitrary period of time has been. And, in just before the gate closes, it's time to do just that here at unpacking my library.
First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.
Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.
1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.
2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.
3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.
4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.
5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.
6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
On the Giving and Receiving of Books
I always give people books at Christmas; I almost never get books from other people on Christmas. This is fine with me; I get enough books, however they're got, that I don't especially have to count on Christmas for any kind of influx. That I have become expected as a giver of books, too, is fine with me. It is rare, I suppose, and I am lucky, I suppose, to have any sort of gift-giving nature that coincides so nicely with my larger nature; it makes a man feel nicely fixed in the universe. My brother likes dance as much as I like books, and it is not as though that translates nicely into his gift-giving life.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Mall and the Bookstore
Today I went Christmas shopping at the mall, even though I went to the same mall -- and, more importantly, the bike shop and the bookstore -- yesterday and bought all of the gifts that I am going to buy for anyone. So I suppose that it is not right to say that I went Christmas shopping at the mall, but rather that I went to the mall in the company of people who were Christmas shopping. I don't know exactly what it was that I was doing, then.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Short Story Mixtape
Before I heard about the subject of this piece from the Guardian UK, I had already thought of it, for the first time that I especially remember in a bar in Buffalo: when a girl whom I was talking to refused my offer of a mix cd because she already had enough mix cds, I told her that that was ok because I don't pay enough attention to new music these days to offer what I feel like counts as an engaged mix cd anyway, and what (shifting here to the contemplative register) I would really like to do was offer people a Short Story Mixtape, a book of short stories that I had personally curated for someone's linear enjoyment. Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides had done it; why not bring their fun to the masses? The girl at the bar told me that she didn't like short stories, saying that if something was going to be short it should just be a poem and if it were going to be long it should just grow a pair and be a novel. But! The people who brought us the Kindle are now bringing us the download-alone short story, which means that my idea (and really, it's an obvious idea, I don't want to sound like those people in the Windows 7 commercials) could be a reality.
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
Monday, December 14, 2009
What Does Charles Kinbote Look Like?
Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.
When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?
When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?
Friday, December 11, 2009
In Praise of the Book Table Guy
It is too cold for the book table guy, apparently, because I wanted to go buy a book from him and he's not there. The book table guy -- or, I might say, my book table guy, because there are others -- is a guy with a van who sets up several tables of books along West 4th Street, near the NYU library, and sells them to you for smallish amounts of cash. I don't totally understand his operation; there are five tables, and some of them seem to have their own dedicated workers: I do not know whether these men are his underlings or his competition. And his level of knowledge of his wares is uncertain: sometimes he seems very excited to sell me books (he knew an awful lot about the Man in the High Castle) and other times it appears to be just another transaction, commodities for dollars.
There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.
Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.
There are certain things for which I can rely upon my book table guy: he always has a bunch of cheapie Wodehouse mass markets, he always has at least two copies of the Second Sex, and he always has several things edited by Marshall McLuhan. I don't know where he gets his Wodehouse and de Beauvoir and McLuhan, but he's always got them. And it wasn't until I met the book table guy that I decided that I don't like e-readers. Up to now, the arguments against the e-reader, and for the e-reader, have been all academic for me. I don't particularly want one, but to each her own. But thinking about the book table guy, and the trunks of old books that his van wouldn't hold if all of his wholesalers or donors had bought electronic files instead, made me feel at least slightly philosophically opposed to them. (I know that I have blogged earlier about the failure of e-readers to show off how recondite my personal reading is, but that was more a vanity statement than a philosophical one.) The book table guy (when it is warm out, anyway) reminds you that the book as a thing that sits on its shelf is something that sits, which is to say it is something that is. It can do things you don't intend. When one buys her shiny new copy of the Code of the Woosters, she does not imagine that someday that copy, yellow and with is back cover mysteriously flaking away, will delight someone she's never met while he flies home for Thanksgiving in the relatively distant future. And that is something about books to go all swoony over.
Our namesake essayist writes about knowing the history of one's books from the point of view of a collector, and his namesake essay suggests a man who takes pride in knowing whence the physical objects that make up his unpacked library. What I like so much about the books I've got from the book table guy isn't their history so much as their futures; as these books, lumps of paper and glue, have come to me, so might they get dumped off from me to people I've never known. And the truncation of those futures is, to me, the first frightening thing about the advent of the e-readers that I've ever felt at all viscerally.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Life Sentences
The other day a friend of mine called me and told me that she had a list of fifteen great opening sentences from novels, and then she named them, and I correctly identified the books that twelve of them opened. I don't think that this speaks to my outstanding knowledge of things, so much as the general fame of first sentences, last sentences, and cool sentences in general. I seem to recall reading somewhere lately that the sentence is the basic unit of any kind of meaning. This is given a relatively loose reading of the sentence (a sample of this kind of "sentence" was a weather report claiming that Tuesday's High would be 34 degrees Fahrenheit and Low 36 degrees Fahrenheit), but I think it makes sense. The reason for that is because there are dozens and dozens of sentences with which I am infatuated, and a negligent number of phrases about which I feel the same way. Even the ones that do -- James's "a second and even a more extravagant umbrella", Shakespeare's "so musical a discord" -- I actually like synecdochally, as parts representing their sentence wholes which I like even more.
I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.
When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.
By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!
I was given the task in school of writing a perfect sentence, in accordance with Donald Barthelme's perfect writing assignment that he used to give his students. The perfect sentence is one that is i) surprising, ii) in some sense true, iii) beautiful, and iv) possessed of a metaphysical dimension. His example of a sentence fulfilling only condition i, and of a sentence fulfilling only conditions one and two, are both fantastic: the former is "It has always been my desire to sleep with -- that is, to have sexual intercourse with -- the New York Review of Books." and the latter is "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur, which breaks your heart.". His example of a perfect sentence, one that meets all four criteria, is from Kafka and goes like this: "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand, and becomes part of the ceremony.". That is a great Kafka sentence, to be sure. Our professor in this class provided us with a selection of sentences that he had culled for their perfection, and a lot of them were good, but none of them were as good as that Kafka sentence, and I think the reason why is that the sentences culled from their homes are, while indeed building blocks of meaning, building blocks more like Legos than anything else.
When I was young, it bothered me that if I built a wall out of Legos, the top level of the wall still had rising out of it the studs that all of the blocks making up the lower strata of the wall had as well. Each block in the lower strata called out for a capping level of blocks, and each was satisfied; but those on the top level were not. It should come as no surprise that I spent a huge amount of my childhood by myself, with childish things and a furrowed brow. It should come as no further surprise that I spend a huge amount of my time currently by myself with a furrowed brow, although now I do it surrounded by words instead of Legos. Sentences, however gorgeous, if yanked from their places of residence, seem yanked: they want to be prepared for, and to work at preparing for something else (hence the mania, I suppose, for first and last sentences, which are half saturated). And so I wonder what it would be like to make a craft of just sentences. One such is Kafka's sentence-story about the leopards and the chalices, which is not yanked from anywhere, but designed simply to stand as a magnificent sentence. That sentence seems less to me like a Lego, and more like an ice cube: complete, glistening, inscrutable (ice cubes are inscrutable, right?) Somewhere, there is a sentence-smith waiting to just churn out little igloos of perfect sentences, and I cannot wait.
By the dubs, I had to actually write two sentences that attempted to meet Barthelme's criteria, and I am going to post them in the comments -- where you should too!
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