On Love Affairs With Books
Read a story from the New Yorker (Feb 25, 2005) "The Beards" by Jonathan Lethem. One of my cronies sent me the article because it reminded him of me.
It was basically a mini-memoir in the form of essays about books and records and movies he was in love with when he was a teenager. Fripp and Eno's "No Pussyfooting". Citizen Kane. Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Bob Dylan records. (Lethem was four years younger than me. For him, to do Bob Dylan was to be a man out of time, an eccentric.)
It feels weirdly voyeuristic watching him remembering reading these books. Like watching someone sleep with your ex-girlfriend.
Your relationship with your books is a profound and monogamous one, but only on your part.
In fact your partner crawls in the laps of perhaps thousands of other people.
This is a fact that continues to feel shocking, and a little nasty. Why that?
The extraordinary intimacy with which we interact with our books. The way we wad up and break the backs of little paperbacks. It is a rough form of love. (The stories of Samuel Johnson's way of manhandling books. For Dr Johnson, to read a book was to ravish it.)
The way that words and phrases and pet analogies become wedded into our own way of talking, welded into our nature.
If by nature we're not happy with our manner of talking, we hate the very cadence and tonal character of our own speech (and who does not?) , they become prostheses of a sort, they become parts of us just as my glasses are part of my face.
For myself, there's something about little fattish paperbacks.
Science Fiction. I remember the difference was when I was a kid: you could own paperbacks. They became part of you in a way a library book could not. And more often than not, I didn't know anybody else reading the same stuff I was...
We are lulled into forgetting these slick, perfect friends of ours who know us so well were manufactured dreams, dreamed up and pressed into paper and plastic by large and powerful corporations, with their legal ownerships, legal environment, nourished and protected by phalanxes of lawyers and marketing drones.
An industry.
Anyway, I'm thinking about The Chameleon Book, and relating it to the little paperbacks I would breathlessly buy as a teenager. It is a book about them, to a certain extent.
But it occurs to me that in a certain way, TCB is more like them (more like how I felt about them) than they actually were.
It dawns on me that TCB really, literally is a book being read by a tiny coterie of gifted, knowledgeable, quirky people all over the world.
Surely this is one good way to measure a book: look at the people who are reading it.
(A Borgesian question. Could a book in itself be rather unremarkable, or even very bad in some ways, and yet in some way be very be very great, because it successfully helped form a great community?)
It was basically a mini-memoir in the form of essays about books and records and movies he was in love with when he was a teenager. Fripp and Eno's "No Pussyfooting". Citizen Kane. Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Bob Dylan records. (Lethem was four years younger than me. For him, to do Bob Dylan was to be a man out of time, an eccentric.)
It feels weirdly voyeuristic watching him remembering reading these books. Like watching someone sleep with your ex-girlfriend.
Your relationship with your books is a profound and monogamous one, but only on your part.
In fact your partner crawls in the laps of perhaps thousands of other people.
This is a fact that continues to feel shocking, and a little nasty. Why that?
The extraordinary intimacy with which we interact with our books. The way we wad up and break the backs of little paperbacks. It is a rough form of love. (The stories of Samuel Johnson's way of manhandling books. For Dr Johnson, to read a book was to ravish it.)
The way that words and phrases and pet analogies become wedded into our own way of talking, welded into our nature.
If by nature we're not happy with our manner of talking, we hate the very cadence and tonal character of our own speech (and who does not?) , they become prostheses of a sort, they become parts of us just as my glasses are part of my face.
For myself, there's something about little fattish paperbacks.
Science Fiction. I remember the difference was when I was a kid: you could own paperbacks. They became part of you in a way a library book could not. And more often than not, I didn't know anybody else reading the same stuff I was...
We are lulled into forgetting these slick, perfect friends of ours who know us so well were manufactured dreams, dreamed up and pressed into paper and plastic by large and powerful corporations, with their legal ownerships, legal environment, nourished and protected by phalanxes of lawyers and marketing drones.
An industry.
Anyway, I'm thinking about The Chameleon Book, and relating it to the little paperbacks I would breathlessly buy as a teenager. It is a book about them, to a certain extent.
But it occurs to me that in a certain way, TCB is more like them (more like how I felt about them) than they actually were.
It dawns on me that TCB really, literally is a book being read by a tiny coterie of gifted, knowledgeable, quirky people all over the world.
Surely this is one good way to measure a book: look at the people who are reading it.
(A Borgesian question. Could a book in itself be rather unremarkable, or even very bad in some ways, and yet in some way be very be very great, because it successfully helped form a great community?)
posted by Freeman Crouch at 6:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home