
Happy Friday!
A possibly futile attempt to protect a thing with pages and a cover from electronic destruction.
Plans for the Book City were first proposed in 1989, as the country was emerging from a period of political repression. Publishing had gathered momentum and status after years of underground activity and censorship, and it re-emerged after the liberalisation of the regime in 1987 in an explosion of small, often family-run publishers. Their beautifully crafted books attempted to re-engage the nation with the history and culture that had been distorted, manipulated and lost over a period which included colonial rule from Japan, brutal civil war and military dictatorship. The project was also, at least in part, a reaction to the rapacious redevelopment of Seoul, the loss of the city’s historic fabric and its rapid embrace of the culture of bigness and congestion. That it was christened a “City to Recover Lost Humanity” tells us much about its creators’ intentions.
Thank you so much for submitting the proposal for [book title] to Chronicle Books for consideration for future publication, but I'm afraid that it does not suit our present publishing program. We appreciate having had the opportunity to consider this project. We wish you the best in finding the right publisher for it.
Before I leave for vacation, I wanted to get back to you regarding [book title]. [The author] is a fine, fine writer, and I liked especially the descriptive passages about the architecture of the town’s buildings. I’m afraid, though, that the whole love story just didn’t come alive for me, and that ultimately there just wasn’t enough tension in the novel as a whole to make it work the way I would want, so it has to be a pass for us.
Thanks, as always, for a chance to consider something from you, and I wish you and the author all the best with this book. Please do keep trying me.
Sometime late last year -- I don't remember when, exactly -- I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. That's a problem if you do what I do, but it's an even bigger problem if you're the kind of person I am. Since I discovered reading, I've always been surrounded by stacks of books. I read my way through camp, school, nights, weekends; when my girlfriend and I backpacked through Europe after college graduation, I had to buy a suitcase to accommodate the books I picked up along the way.I think if you read this blog, you'll probably recognize yourself in that paragraph. I know I do. Heck, one suitcase? Sometime I need two or more. Since I know, exactly, when this dry spell started I figured it would pass as the novelty of the iPhone wears off and I'd go back to the old standby, books. But that hasn't happened yet, I'm afraid. Is this some kind of Apple mind trick to keep me pacified until their version of an ebook reader comes out (not that I would use it. See here for more unfiltered grumping)? Perhaps.
So what happened? It isn't a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else's world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.Preach it, brother. My will is weak, weak, weak. I look at my shiny iPhone and know that on the short bus trip into Harvard Square I can check my email, send Brian a bratty text message, and review the days headlines on the Washington Post all with a few finger, um, touches, I guess. If the bus is crowded there is nowhere to stand such that my book doesn't jab some attractive woman in the arm or some muscled dude in the pecs. The iPhone solves that problem. I think, also, that the iPhone does provide some of Mr. Ulin's wistful "waiting stillness...filing us with thoughts and observations...make them part of ourselves" as I do read serious and literary articles on my iPhone while waiting for the light at Coolidge Avenue to FINALLY turn green. I learn stuff. I am often in awe of some prose pieces I find on various websites but his point is well taken. I still feel unfulfilled. Why?
Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.I agree. In effect what I have fallen victim to is what much of the nation already thinks but isn't aware of: we have conflated knowledge and information. I have created a monster in my head via this electronic device that somehow reading newspapers, blogs, and websites constitutes the same kind of intellectual activity as reading a book does. I don't know how it happened. Worse, I don't necessarily know what to do about it as technology becomes faster, more portable, and easier to use. I am worried that this confusion could continue as our beloved but obsolete industry continues to work its way to "the wrong side of the grass," as a friend of mine once said. "What I'm struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age," David Ulin writes. I think he has nailed it. The iPhone has allowed me to feel "connected" to what is happening but in reality it has just amplified the "the buzz." I have parsed my time incorrectly thinking that any reading, irrespective of how trivial, is important when really jumping from one website to another while on the T is just an overvaluation of "a series of disconnected riffs and fragments." I worry that I am losing the ability to be contemplative.
How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?This is easy. I shall simply choose to not to be in touch all the time. What I have always loved about books is that they allow me to shrink the huge size of the universe and human experience down into a size where I can see myself as part of a narrative which began with the first humans and extending through past my death until the sun expands in 5 billion years. Specifically, there is already someone who has experienced what I have and reading it in a book makes me feel connected in a way I have a hard time explaining with language. Mr. Ulin uses Saint Augustine's Confessions as an example of what I am writing about here:
There is the fixity of the text, which doesn't change whether written yesterday or a thousand years ago. St. Augustine composed his "Confessions" in AD 397, but when he details his spiritual upheaval, his attempts to find meaning in the face of transient existence, the immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide."[T]he immediacy of his longing obliterates the temporal divide." Perfect. Much more poetic than I am able to pull off but spot on what I mean. The iPhone, even with the ability to look at my beloved while I speak with her, does not accomplish the same thing. Ever. Consquently I am more convinced than ever that there isn't an app for quite everything yet.
All these years later, I find myself in a not-dissimilar position, in which reading has become an act of meditation, with all of meditation's attendant difficulty and grace. I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It's harder than it used to be, but still, I read.Now, where the heck is that copy of Bombs Away?
On many Saturday mornings, I load the trunk of my car with whatever used books are piling up in my basement and drive to Whitlock's in Woodbridge or Niantic Book Barn in Niantic. Some of this is a holdover from the days when I sold books at a flea market in Washington, D.C., and, before that, worked at a bookshop on Capitol Hill. Most of it, however, results from my chronic case of bibliomania. I don't want cash for the old books. I want to trade them for more books. I just can't seem to ever have enough books.