"Pleased to Meet You" -- M. Allen Cunningham's Video Ice-Breaker

My illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, is currently 74% funded with 26 funding days remaining.

To offer prospective supporters some getting-to-know-you time, I made this short video. I answer four basic questions, and you get a peek at my writing studio, my bookshelf, and a thing I like to call my “valuable downgrade.”

The fundraiser has come this far thanks to 47 generous supporters. But this is a fund or bust deal. If the goal is not reached by the deadline, the project receives no aid. I'd love to have your support (and send you some special gifts!). It's a no-risk proposition, it's tax-deductible, and you get something unique in return (autographed books, in some cases).

For more about Date of Disappearance and how you can help, please see my project video: www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance.

Thanks for your consideration.
-- M. Allen Cunningham

From a Letter to a Fellow Writer Who "Hit it Big" and Got Worried About Authenticity

Dear ______,

I live by the belief that we artists have got to stick together, and I admire anybody like yourself who would devote so many years, paid or not, to the production of something as invaluable — if unquantifiable and increasingly anachronistic — as a serious literary work.

I have no doubt that your new book is well worth reading, and well worth the astronomical sum paid for it. I take no issue with writers being well-paid. I’m all for that! What’s troublesome, to you and me both, is the conventional logic of big publishing we’re already seeing at work here: a logic which holds that to discuss books in terms of the author’s payment is a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature. Culture, according to such logic, is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better-paid the book, the more worthy of attention.

We object to this. It is success-cult nonsense, long obtaining in society rags and in those Manhattan cocktail parties we read about in the New Yorker, and it spills more and more into respected literary discourse and threatens to become a lingua franca.

“How big was the advance?”

“Seven figures.”

“Well! I should read it, shouldn’t I?”

“Oh, you will. Like every other reader in the Western Hemisphere.”

In reality, as experience has taught you and me well, literature flowers and fructifies under a different sun. Its servants toil alone, usually at the edge of things. Most of the world’s deserving works are fated to exist in undeserved obscurity while the authors do wage-labor in factories, retail stores, or academe — or simply scrounge for food. You and I both recognize that 99.8 percent of all worthy literary creators live by this truth, a truth existent through the ages.

And you believe as passionately as I do, I know, that young writers — or old, still struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists.

Our art lives nowhere but in the work itself, the words on the page. The art surely does not live in whatever gross sum may be paid for it by the hit-hungry New York publishers.

You know this, and that’s why you’re worrying. Be comforted that you know it. Knowing it, you’ll stay the course.

Yours,

—M 

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

Funding for the New Book Approaches 75 Percent -- With Your Help!

My illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance, continues to gather support through its funding page at United States Artists. I'm astonished and grateful to watch the supporter base grow steadily each week.

Thanks to the folks at Ecotone Magazine, this week’s Patron Extraordinaire! perk goes out to TWO Date of Disappearance supporters!

ANONYMOUS #3 (pledged 10/6) and ALF will each receive a year’s subscription to Ecotone!

Congrats, Anonymous and ALF!

-- WHERE WE STAND --

This week we enter the second half of the Date of Disappearance funding period. I’m extremely pleased to report that after climbing 7 percentage points last week alone, the project stands at just shy of 70 percent funded!

Thank you to all my project supporters for bringing the book to this point. I’m honored by your response.

And to remind those who may have considered supporting the project, but prefer not to pledge online, you can pledge by check using this helpful form.

Here’s to rounding the three-quarters bend soon!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

The past few weeks have provided me the fun opportunity of sharing the things I find most enriching and inspiring. As a gesture of my continued gratitude, I’m sharing another local favorite this week. Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, October 22^nd will be eligible to receive…

An attractive silver tin of loose-leaf tea: premium, organic, and handcrafted by Portland’s premiere teashop, Tea Chai Té, whose staff believes that “tea is a liquid hug for the soul.” I can tell you from personal experience, the product they serve proves it to be so! A cup of this stuff perfectly complements a quiet hour with a book.

 

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 22^nd

-- AN EASY PASS-ALONG --

With $1,500 still to raise in the next 32 days, continued support is indispensable. I’d like to make it as easy as possible to share Date of Disappearance with others, so I’ve included below a basic message for tacking onto any Facebook link, pasting into an e-mail or onto a blog, or just adapting as you wish. Please use it freely with a simple copy and paste:

Looking to make a tax-deductible donation? Want to find a personal way to support the arts? I just did, by pitching in on a special project at one of America’s most prestigious arts organizations.

At the link below you can view a short video about Date of Disappearance, the illustrated limited edition book I’m supporting, and hear the author explain his vision for the project. Pledge any amount from $1 upward, or pledge $25 and receive an autographed copy of the book, plus additional perks. Due to the help of supporters like me, this project is almost 70 percent funded. But the fundraising period is limited, the clock is ticking, and if pledges fall short of the goal the project will receive no funds (and you will owe nothing).

Please consider joining me in supporting a dedicated young artist—and the arts in general. As Oscar Wilde once put it, “What we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”   

http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance    

---------------------

With gratitude, and for the love of books,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

            $4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

            $3,251 (or 68%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

            $1,509

Fundraising Days Remaining:

            32

Visit Date of Disappearance on Facebook

Check out ten sneak-peek sentences from Date of Disappearance

Win a Lit-Mag Subscription This Week!

Sundays have been lots of fun here at Date of Disappearance Headquarters lately, thanks to the weekly Patron Extraordinaire! drawing. This week’s gift, a short story collection by an acknowledged master in the form, posed me a pleasing decision-making challenge—and in the end I just couldn’t narrow it down to a single title, so … I narrowed it down to TWO!

The Date of Disappearance Administrative Assistant (my three-year old son), has just pulled from the hat the names of two Patrons Extraordinaire!

A & G McTIGHE will receive the book Dancing After Hours: Stories by Andre Dubus

MARIAN will receive The Afterlife & Other Stories by John Updike

Congrats Marian and McTighes! These books are both masterworks and I’m confident you’ll find lots to admire in each. Look for them in the mail soon!

-- PROGRESS --
This week I hoped we could climb well into the fifty-percent-funded margin, but thanks to your tremendous ongoing support, we flew through the fifties and are currently at 62%! I am amazed and full of gratitude. Thank you all.

-- ON-WORD! --
With forty days remaining and roughly $1,800 left to raise, the task of encouraging others’ support continues to be Priority Number One. Date of Disappearance now has an official Facebook page, which I hope will offer easy ways for any of you to share (or continue sharing) the project with your own community.

(And/or feel free to pass along the link to those ten Sneak-Peek Sentences from the book that I shared last week)

Thanks for everything you all continue to do to spread news of this project widely!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! GIFT --
Anyone who has pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the close of next Saturday, October 15th, will be eligible to receive:

A year's subscription to the cutting-edge literary magazine, Ecotone. Bristling with knock-out fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and comics, Ecotone (not a “nature magazine”) is quietly, steadily enriching our cultural life with each new gorgeously designed, inevitably award-winning issue. You’re going to love finding this mag in your mailbox—and just see if it doesn’t elicit oohs and aahs when displayed on your coffee table!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 15th

-- SEVEN YEARS ON --
This week marked the anniversary of my first novel’s publication seven years ago. It’s been a wild, weird ride for me since The Green Age of Asher Witherow first appeared in 2004. In a blog post contemplating this, I wrote of Date of Disappearance:

“It will be a small book, born quietly at midday, and in a limited number of copies—not what they call a ‘breakout.’ But it will be something lovely, with illustrated pages you can turn by hand.” 

I reiterated my long-held belief that “the art of language and story is sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit,” and I gave an appreciative shout-out: “Here’s to those who can help me realize my quiet, somewhat old-fashioned idea.”

In other words, if you've supported or intend to support the project, here’s to YOU! I’m confident we’re going to reach that goal together.

With gratitude,
—M
http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/project/date_of_disappearance

-- THE STATS --
Date of Disappearance Project Goal:
$4,760
Amount Raised as of Today:
$2,936 (or 62%!)
Remaining Amount to Raise:
$1,824
Fundraising Days Remaining:
39

Economics of the Spirit

On this day seven years ago, my first novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow was published. Among the good things that happened for that book, the luckiest was the phenomenal support it enjoyed from this country’s independent booksellers. The Green Age did not exactly come into the world branded for the bestseller list. In fact the book had a lot riding against it. A few examples:

·         It was published just as The Da Vinci Code’s years-long chart-topping run began

·         It was not topical or terribly plot-driven

·         Its author was a total unknown and had received no headline-worthy advance

·         Its publisher was a small decentralized press with no prior titles

·         It was entitled The Green Age of Asher Witherow (the what of who??)

Nevertheless, independent booksellers got behind The Green Age before it even landed, naming it the month’s #1 Book Sense Pick and warmly hosting me in stores from Seattle to Hollywood, from St. Paul to Blytheville, Arkansas in a string of book-signings spanning a good six months.

Because of the indies The Green Age was widely reviewed, because of the indies it saw a second printing within a month of hitting the shelves, and because of the indies a young writer got an actual royalty check.

Times have been tough for independent bookstores since the rise of the chain booksellers, big-box retailers, and the advent of online commerce in the nineties. But probably never have the indies faced a season of famine to match today’s. E-books, coupled with general economic woes and other factors, bring down another neighborhood bookstore or two every few days, it seems. These closures, each one of them, do injury to our community-level cultural life (what other cultural life do we really have?). And I’ll dispense with dignity a minute in order to tell you first-hand that the injury trickles down. That’s to say, authors themselves (those of my “midlist” variety, anyway) don’t go unscathed.

A few years back, in a letter to the New York Times Book Review, I wrote some words on behalf of “unhonored and unpaid” fiction writers whose work “goes into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed, and unbought.” I argued that “the greater number of literature’s real practitioners work under such conditions.” Were I to find somebody else writing this today, these few years later, I’d be tempted to say it reeks with misplaced optimism. For increasingly I fear that honorable, obscure work—of the kind the history of literature is built upon—does not “go into the world” at all, or at least not into solid, silent, beautiful print. Instead, I fear such work languishes in the rooms of its creation.

In the absence of essential cultural advocates like our dwindling number of independent bookstores, serious newspaper review columns, and small publishers who can let an idiosyncratic vision guide them and make a go of it financially, what can we expect? Obscure authors of unlikely little books like The Green Age used to get, if not steady pay or renown, at least an airing in print. Today these authors get whatever artistic/democratic access the Internet can offer them (and that is something, yes).

But today, seven years from the outset of my publishing career, as I stand at my own uncertain turning in the path, I wish to publicly redouble my gratitude to our independent booksellers. If/when my current project gets off the ground, I intend in my own small way to shine a light on you all. I’m equally grateful for the existence of United States Artists, the dynamic organization that just may help me bring my new book to light. It will be a small book, born quietly at midday, and in a limited number of copies—not what they call a “breakout.” But it will be something lovely, with illustrated pages you can turn by hand.

That letter of mine to the New York Times closed with my impassioned avowal that “the art of language and story [is] sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.” I still believe it.

Here’s to those who can help me realize my quiet, somewhat old-fashioned idea.

—M          

Sneak-Peek Sentences! : An Update on the Illustrated Limited Edition

Illustration by Nathan Shields

The Date of Disappearance fundraiser continues strong at United States Artists. The matching-grant segment was a phenomenal success: roughly $800 raised in a little more than a week!

To give everyone a fun glimpse of the book you've supported or are considering supporting, I’ve prepared a PDF with ten sneak-peek sentences from Date of Disappearance. Take a look.

Renewed thanks to all who continue to share the project, encourage new support, and keep the numbers climbing toward the goal. Date of Disappearance is now 49% funded with 46 days remaining! That’s about $2,400 left to go – certainly an achievable amount, considering the progress so far. But this is fund or bust! Please help that percentage get well into the fifties this week!

-- THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT THIS LIMITED-TIME FUNDRAISER --

a)      This is “micro-philanthropy.” — Anybody can pledge any amount from $1 upward (it's tax-deductible, and every dollar helps)

b)      Your pledge can reserve you a book. — $25 gets you the finished, numbered limited edition. You’ll receive a low-numbered copy hot from the printer, plus additional perks!

c)      Support takes many forms. — If you can’t pledge monetarily, you can pledge in spirit by helping to spread the word. Embed the Date of Disappearance video on your blog, “Like” it and pass it around!

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

All supporters who have pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the end of Saturday, October 8th will be eligible to receive, in addition to standard pledge perks …

A short story collection by one of our acknowledged masters in the form. This author’s name shall be a surprise for next week (as I narrow it down from several whose work continually inspires), but I guarantee you a meaningful and memorable read!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct. 9th

Congrats to Julie Pollastro, winner of this week's PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE drawing! Julie receives an eye-catching Western Meadowlark coffee mug from Portland’s own Powell’s Books. Enjoy, Julie!

In gratitude, and for the love of books,
 —M

-- THE STATS --
Date of Disappearance Project Goal:
            $4,760
Amount Raised as of Today:
            $2,336 (or 49%!)
Remaining Amount to Raise:
            $2,424
Fundraising Days Remaining:
            46

Thomas Hardy et Moi

Recently I contributed to the "Art of the Sentence" series they've got running at the Tin House blog. From the many memorable sentences that came to mind, I chose to say a few words about this one:

“But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.”

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

My thoughts on Hardy's sentence can be found here.

Why It's Natural to Need Help

— Here’s to The Helpers —

A Lone Wolf Sets Out: 
In my earlier life a driving passion and talent for the theater led me to believe I’d pursue a career as an actor, but in the end it was the written component of drama that drew me into literature. Always somewhat ill at ease in the communal, collaborative atmosphere of the thespian world, I found in the more secret art of writing a quietude, concentration, and privacy that appealed to my solitary nature. Here was something you could do (perhaps had to do?) alone.

Writing required no facilities, no stage lights or auditorium seating, no orchestra pits, no janitors to tidy the lavatories. Most importantly, perhaps, it required no return at the box office. String together a few healthy advances and you were set (after all, you weren’t aiming for world domination). As a writer you didn’t have to fit your life into a rehearsal calendar or the matrix of personalities (outsized egos amongst them) that make up a theatrical cast. Writing required nobody else’s presence. The writer could be cast, crew, director, conductor, usher, and janitor — all in one, and all it took was pen and paper, discipline, and yes, self-reliance.

Given those basic tools plus a strong commitment to excellence, it looked like a writer really could “make it” alone and enjoy the gratification of success earned by pure individual merit as well as the liberty of being one’s own man.

I embraced this vision early, and believed that in doing so I was parting ways with the false American Dream, a.k.a.: the rat race. No nine-to-five or gold watch for me, thank you very much (even if I worked full-time to pay the bills — and for periods I did — it would not be my employment that defined me, but my calling as a writer; this I determined early, and so it was).

It was a useful vision in its way, and galvanized me to great productivity. Later on, however, even after successfully completing and publishing numerous works, I developed a lurking suspicion that my Lone Wolf outlook might be a bit flawed. Most prominently, it seemed to engender mild but undeniable feelings of humiliation whenever I filled out grant or fellowship applications. And months later, receiving the form letter containing the phrase “your application was not successful,” a strange dejection would dog me for days: Some Lone Wolf you are! Spurned Puppy is more like it.

Something was out of joint.

Recently, upon reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, it occurred to me that my early go-it-alone vision was never really a break with the American Dream, but more precisely a variation upon it. That is to say, I had subscribed to the (western capitalist) idea that one succeeds alone.

Thornton Wilder once described American individualism thusly: 

"The inability to draw strength from any dependency."

I had crept dangerously close to feeling ashamed of myself for seeking, or needing to seek, help.

Success Myths: 
In Outliers Gladwell encourages us to see through our culture’s success myths, and presents numerous compelling case-studies to help us do so. It seems to me his message is particularly beneficial in a present moment rife with job loss.

"In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness. … [But] people don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." 

Later he goes on:

"The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think Outliers [Gladwell's term for the brilliantly successful] spring naturally from the earth."

Meritocracy: “Those Worthy of Success Should Need No Help”:
America, we are encouraged to believe, is a pure meritocracy. But we do well to remember — especially in tough economic times like now — that faith in meritocracy is often a recipe for unhappiness, for as Alain de Botton eloquently reminds us in his remarkable book Status Anxiety:

"In a meritocratic world in which well-paid jobs [can] be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money [begins] to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich are not only wealthier, it seem[s]; they might also be plain better."

De Botton quotes this creepy sentiment from Andrew Carnegie, written in the latter’s 1920 Autobiography:

"Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do."

Anti-Gladwellian myths have long obtained all around us:

• The self-made icons of success did it on their own
• Success is won by individual virtue and determination
• To need help is to be unworthy of success

As these success-myths persist, the following equation too often applies:

Belief in myth of self-made success + Belief in meritocracy = Shame/Disillusionment/Despair/Resignation

The Lone Wolf Was Never Really Alone:
Though it’s true that the discipline of writing must ultimately be honed and matured in solitude, the sustainment of this endeavor calls for help, be it moral or financial, from beyond the writer’s solitary zone. The bracing encouragement of friends and loved ones, the inspiration of teachers or literary luminaries long dead, and indeed, the material assistance of grants and endowments — all are essential to the writer’s survival and vitality.

I may give my best, do my all, and still need help. We all need it sometimes. Without the unfailing support and encouragement of my wife it would have been immeasurably more difficult for me to write and publish two novels before I was thirty. This is just the tip of the iceberg of my moral debts.

This month I’ve partnered with United States Artists to raise funds for my latest book, which will be something of a special offering: an illustrated, limited edition short story collection. In the two weeks since the fundraiser launched, 27 supporters have come forward to take us 45% of the way to the funding goal. Here’s to USA for helping out artists like me — and here’s to all those who have so generously lent their support so far, whether by pledging, helping me spread the word, or both.

I have not done and cannot do it alone. That, paradoxically, is a freeing thought.

Date of Disappearance Fundraiser Update

The Date of Disappearance Administrative Assistant has just drawn the name of this week’s PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE!

Ray and Joanna Shields will receive a complete, personalized, downloadable audio version of my short story “Summer.” Congrats, Ray and Joanna! I’ll be in touch.

Yesterday, in a blog post that contemplated Malcolm Gladwell, Andrew Carnegie, and American success myths, I wrote:

“Though it’s true that the discipline of writing must ultimately be honed and matured in solitude, the sustainment of this endeavor calls for help, be it moral or financial, from beyond the writer’s solitary zone. … I have not done and cannot do it alone.”

Continued thanks to all my supporters for stepping forward to help with what I envision as a beautiful and unusual project. Because of you, Date of Disappearance is now 30% funded.

-- FUND OR BUST! --

We’ve still got $3,315 to raise in the mere 54 days left until United States Artists pulls the plug on this fundraiser. In effect right now, a special matching grant is doubling all incoming pledges until we’ve reached the 45% line. If you've intended to pledge but haven’t gotten around to it yet, please know your money will go twice as far.

And have I mentioned pledges can be made offline, without a credit card? Here’s a helpful link: http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/pdf/USA_Manual_Donation_Form.pdf

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

All supporters who have pledged in the time between this fundraiser’s launch and the end of Saturday, October 2nd will be eligible to receive (in addition to the standard pledge perks)…

An eye-catching Western Meadowlark coffee mug from what is said to be the largest independent bookstore in the world, Portland’s own Powell’s Books. Impress your friends and stir envy among fellow bibliophiles!

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15

PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Oct.1^st

In gratitude, and for the love of books,

—M

-- THE STATS --

Date of Disappearance Project Goal:

            $4,760

Amount Raised as of Today:

            $1,445 (or 30%!)

Remaining Amount to Raise:

            $3,315

Fundraising Days Remaining:

            54

Announcing the Date of Disappearance Patron Extraordinaire! Program

We're entering week two of fundraising for my illustrated limited edition story collection, Date of Disappearance. Many thanks to all those who have pledged. We're at 15% of the project goal! Now I'd like to add some extra perks to encourage your support.

Each week, beginning next Sunday, Sept. 25th, my Administrative Assistant (my three-year-old son) will select by random drawing a Date of Disappearance PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! Every person who has pledged $15 or more since the project launched will be automatically entered in the drawing, and each week’s Patron Extraordinaire! will receive, in addition to the official pledge perks, an EXCLUSIVE NO-EXTRA-COMMITMENT GIFT!

Make your pledge by the end of Saturday (9/24), and be eligible to receive…

-- THIS WEEK’S PATRON EXTRAORDINAIRE! PERK --

A downloadable audio version of my short story “Summer” in its entirety, including my personal audio greeting and dedication to YOU. Listen in the car, on the bus, or during your workout! This is story #7 in the collection. Here’s a two-sentence sneak peek:

“Ingmar came over today. We hung around in the fort and it was like a hundred and ten degrees in there under the fiberglass but we just kept shooting each other with water-uzis.”

MINIMUM PLEDGE: $15
PLEDGE BY: 11:59 p.m. PT, Saturday, Sept. 24th

As we move into Week Two of funding, please remember:

a)      This is “micro-philanthropy.” — Anybody can pledge any amount from $1 upward (and every dollar helps)

b)      Your pledge can reserve you a book. — $25 gets you the finished, numbered limited edition. You’ll receive a low-numbered copy hot from the printer, plus additional perks!

c)      Support takes many forms. — If you can’t pledge monetarily, you can pledge in spirit by helping to spread the word. Embed the Date of Disappearance video on your blog, “Like” it and pass it around!

-- FUN FOR YOUR EARS! --

Now, have a listen to and/or download this audio clip from “We Are Not Civilians Here.” It's Story #4 in the book.

We Are Not Civilians Here, a short story excerpt by M. Allen Cunningham

A Special Way to Support the Literary Arts!

I've launched a project page on the Unites States Artists website, in support of my envisioned limited edition short story collection, Date of Disappearance. This book will feature the astonishing artwork of fellow Portlander Nathan Shields.

The video below illuminates. Please take a look and consider following the link to lend a hand. You can donate as little as $1, or choose from several pledge amounts and receive special gifts (right up to an original short story I will write based on prompts you provide).

A $25 pledge gets you a signed and numbered copy of the limited edition, plus additional perks. All donations are tax deductible. If unable to donate, please help me spread the word! I've got until November 18th to rally the resources.

For love of the codex, and with many thanks,
~M

Prime Passage: Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo (1973)

From Chapter 10…

“I continued to breathe, never before conscious of the effort needed to generate this act. People passed supernaturally across the room, leaving contrails of smoke and scented ash. Others settled around me, moving their lips. All were breathing, sullenly pumping blood, embarked together on a perverse miracle. Our moveable parts carried us past the edge of every deathly metaphysic. Our organs, lifted from our bodies, plucked out with silver pincers and left laboring on bright Tiffany trays, would comprise the finest exhibit of our ability to endure. Euphoric with morphine we’d be wheeled among them, noting proportions and contours, admiring the beauty of what we were. … (p.74)

“I thought of all the inner organs in the room, considered apart from the people they belonged to. For that moment of thought we seemed a convocation of martyrs, visible behind our skin. The room was a cell in a metaphysical painting, full of divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke, entrails gleaming, bladders simmering in painless fires. This was a madman’s truth, to paint us as sacs and flaming lariats, nearly godly in our light, perishable but never ending. I watched the pale girl touch her voluptuous navel. One by one, repacked in sallow cases, we all resumed our breathing.” (p.82)

Prime Passage from On Grief & Reason by Joseph Brodsky: "You become what you read"

Found in "An Immodest Proposal," a speech delivered at the Library of Congress in 1991:

“In the process of composition a poet employs—by and large unwittingly—the two main modes of cognition available to our species: Occidental and Oriental. (Of course both modes are available whenever you find frontal lobes, but different traditions have employed them with different degrees of prejudice.) The first puts a high premium on the rational, on analysis. In social terms, it is accompanied by man’s self-assertion and generally is exemplified by Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum.” The second relies mainly on intuitive synthesis, calls for self-negation, and is best represented by the Buddha. In other words, a poem offers you a sample of complete, not slanted, human intelligence at work. This is what constitutes the chief appeal of poetry, quite apart from its exploiting rhythmic and euphonic properties of the language which are in themselves quite revelatory. A poem, as it were, tells its reader, “Be like me.” And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can’t revert to not having had them. That’s what evolution is all about. … The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual. As it is always in the eye of the beholder, it can’t be wholly embodied save in words: that’s what ushers in a poem.”

(On Grief & Reason, p.206)

Goodbye to Bookstores? Not Yet!

I have a short feature essay in the Oregonian for Sunday, March 13. It deals with the rise of the e-book and the importance, as I see it, of standing up for community and media plurality by supporting bookstores and libraries.

Permit no farewell to the Age of the Bookstore! Clang in my brain goes the thought, prompted by news of Borders, bookselling behemoth, declaring bankruptcy and shuttering stores by a third. Even Borders! Then locally comes word that Powell’s must prune personnel—and in southeast Portland the bright rooms of Looking Glass Books, 38-year cultural institution, are to be stripped and darkened. Outside a banner reads: for lease. One February morning I stand before it, morosely wishful. Had I the bucks and business acumen, I’d charge in and make a quixotic offer myself. To the staff I’d say, “Stay! We’ll hold this line together!”

Instead, clueless with a balance book and already mortgaged to my eyebrows, I shuffle inside to loiter amid liquidation signs, to suck in lovely ink-and-paper aromas while fondling volumes in farewell, and to eavesdrop on the regrets of other patrons. “We’ve loved coming here,” the owner is told. “How we’ll miss it!” “Sorry to see you go!”

Note to self: business acumen was never lacking here. This store’s got its clientele. No, the problem cited here and at Powell’s—and even at Borders HQ—is the immaterial imp known as, yes, the e-book.

Can this be? While one dawdled innocently in the ever-bright chambers of the Internet, flashed-at by ads, teased by Twitter, chloroformed by Facebook, something sinister happened to one’s world. The physical bookstore—actual space-consuming locus of tangible, shelvable books (and ideally of a community’s unique intellectual life)—came under assault from a fusillade of pixels. Pixels!

 Read the rest here.

Prime Passage: Lionel Trilling (1952)

From Trilling's "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (1952), his contribution to a Partisan Review symposium on the subject. Prophetic?

“For purposes of the artist’s salvation, it is best not to speak of the artist at all. It is best to think of him as crazy, foolish, inspired—as an unconditionable kind of man—and to make no provision for him until he appears in person and demands it. Our attitude to the artist is deteriorating as our sense of his need increases. It seems to me that the more we think about doing something for the artist, the less we think of him as Master, and the more we think of him as Postulant or Apprentice. Indeed, it may be coming to be true that for us the Master is the not the artist himself, but the great philanthropic Foundation, which brings artists into being, whose creative act the artist is. All signs point toward our desire to institutionalize the artist, to integrate him into the community. By means of university courses which teach the ‘technique’ of writing, or which arrange for the communication of the spirit from a fully initiated artist to the neophyte, by means of doctoral degrees in creativity, by means of summer schools and conferences, our democratic impulses fulfill themselves and we undertake to prove that art is a profession like another, in which a young man of reasonably good intelligence has a right to succeed. And this undertaking, which is carried out by administrators and by teachers of relatively simple mind, is in reality the response to the theory of more elaborate and refined minds—of intellectuals—who conceive of the artist as the Commissioner of Moral Sanitation, and who demand that he be given his proper statutory salary without delay. I do not hold with the theory that art grows best in hardship. But I become uneasy—especially if I consider the nature of the best of modern art, its demand that it be wrestled with before it consents to bless us—whenever I hear of plans for its early domestication. These plans seem to me an aspect of the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment, of the modern indignation at the idea of entering the life of the spirit without proper provision having been made for full security.”

Prime Passage: "The Responsibility of the Poet" by Wendell Berry (1988)

(From the essay "The Responsibility of the Poet," found in Berry's book, What Are People For?)
 
"A poem reminds us...of the spiritual elation that we call 'inspiration' or 'gift.' Or perhaps we ought to say that it should do so, it should be humble enough to do so, because we know that no permanently valuable poem is made by the merely intentional manipulation of its scrutable components. Hence, it reminds us of love. It is amateur work, lover's work. What we now call 'professionalism' is anathema to it. A good poem reminds us of love because it cannot be written or read in distraction; it cannot be read or understood by anyone thinking of praise or publication or promotion. ...

"We are now inclined to make much of this distinction between amateur and professional, but it is reassuring to know that these words first were used in opposition to each other less than two hundred years ago. Before the first decade of the nineteenth century, no one felt the need for such a distinction -- which established itself, I suppose, because of the industrial need to separate love from work, and so it was made at first to discriminate in favor of professionalism. To those who wish to defend the possibility of good or responsible work, it remains useful today because of the need to discriminate against professionalism.

"Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world." (p.89-90)

Prime Passage: The Paris Review Interview with David McCullough

"I write on an old Royal typewriter, a beauty! ...I've written all my books on it. It was made about 1941 and it works perfectly. I have it cleaned and oiled about once every book and the roller has to be replaced now and then. Otherwise it's the same machine. Imagine--it's more than fifty years old and it still does just what it was built to do! There's not a thing wrong with it.

"I love putting paper in. I love the way the keys come up and actually print the letters. I love it when I swing that carriage and the bell rings like an old trolley car. I love the feeling of making something with my hands. People say, But with a computer you could go so much faster. Well, I don't want to go faster. If anything, I should go slower. I don't think all that fast. They say, But you could change things so readily. I can change things very readily as it is. I take a pen and draw a circle around what I want to move up or down or wherever and then I retype it. Then they say, But you wouldn't have to retype it. But when I'm retyping I'm also rewriting. And I'm listening, hearing what I've written. Writing should be done for the ear. Rosalee reads aloud wonderfully and it's a tremendous help to me to hear her speak what I've written. Or sometimes I read it to her. It's so important. You hear things that are wrong, that call for editing."

Prime Passage: Saul Bellow: Letters

From Bellow's letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, January 20, 1953:


"I am perfectly sure that he will become a major novelist. He has every prerequisite: the personal, definite style, the emotional resources, the understanding of character, the dramatic sense and the intelligence. He understands what the tasks of an imaginative writer of today are. Not to be appalled by these tasks is in and of itself a piece of heroism. Imagination has been steadily losing prestige in American life, it seems to me, for a long time. I am speaking of the poetic imagination. Inferior kinds of imagination have prospered, but the poetic has less credit than ever before. Perhaps that is because there is less room than ever for the personal, spacious, unanxious and free, for the unprepared, unorganized and spontaneous elements from which poetic imagination springs. It is upon writers like Mr. Malamud that the future of literature in America depends, writers who have not sought to protect themselves by joining schools or by identification with  prevailing tastes and tendencies. The greatest threat to writing today is the threat of conformism. Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.

"Literal-minded critics of Mr. Malamud's novel, The Natural, complained that it was not about true-to-life baseball players and failed entirely to see that it was a parable of the man of great endowments, or myth of the champion. I have immense faith in Mr. Malamud's power to make himself understood. I should be very happy to hear that he had become a Guggenheim fellow." (p.118)


Buy Bellow's Letters here.

Thoreau's Walden Roundly Rejected by Today's Publishers

My piece, "From e-mails to Henry David Thoreau's Literary Agent," appears in the Books section of this Sunday's Oregonian (12/19/2010). It's online today:

"Walden; or, Life in the Woods" (rethink title?) seems to us the kind of book most enjoyably read in the forest, but because the scarcity of electrical outlets in the forest will preclude robust e-book sales, I'm afraid we must decline at this time.  ...

Read the whole thing.

Prime Passage: The Din in the Head by Cynthia Ozick (2006)

 “…By the 1970s, the novel as the holy vessel of the imagination (itself having deposed poetry) was undone. Magazines dropped fiction. Notions of journalism as the equal of imaginative writing took hold (“the nonfiction novel” as pioneered by Truman Capote, replicated by Norman Mailer). Bohemians who had been willing enough to endure the romantic penury of cold-water walkups while sneering at popular entertainment were displaced by beatniks who were themselves popular entertainment. …

“With such radical (and representative) changes in the culture, and with High Art in the form of the novel having lost its centrality, the nature of ambition too was bound to alter. This is not to say that young writers today are no longer driven—and some may even be possessed—by the strenuous forces of literary ambition. Zeal, after all, is a constant, and so must be the pool, or the sea, of born writers. But the great engines of technology lure striving talents to television and Hollywood, or to the lighter varieties of theater, or (especially) to the prompt gratifications and high-velocity fame of the magazines, where topical articles generate buzz and gather no moss. The sworn novelists, who despite the devourings of the hour, continue to revere the novel (the novel as moss, with its leisurely accretions of character and incident, its disclosures of secrets, its landscapes and cityscapes and mindscapes, its idiosyncratic particularisms of language and insight)—these sworn novelists remain on the scene, if not on the rise.” p.136

Buy The Din in the Head here.

Prime Passage: An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

"The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)" p.19

Prime Passage: The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch

Of the secondary character called "M," who is Herman Melville:
 
"For so many of his young years, he had written what he could to make his way and make his wage; then, apparently, he had manufactured what he must, and he'd made neither. That is the way of the world, the ebb and flow of dollars, but knowing this could not have been of consolation; and in the pressure in the house -- an atmosphere, like storm, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the very air pressed hard, in silence, at the inner doors of the rooms, the windows looking onto East Twenty-sixth Street -- he drank his drinks and then escaped to walk to work, swallowing his own saliva as it welled like poison in his throat and mouth, and heard, from this remaining friend or that, how many of the other, former, friends were certain he had died." p.186

Prime Passage: Herman Melville on Emerson; "His brains descend down into his neck"

Melville's letter of March 3, 1849 to Evert Duyckinck, friend and editor of The Literary World.

"Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man's swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture, he is an uncommon man.


"Swear he is a humbug -- then he is no uncommon humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified -- I will answer that had not old Zach's father begot him, Old Zach would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire.


"I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish ... to my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. 


"Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is for the most part instantly perceptible. This I see in Mr. Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.


"I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down the stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummit that will. I'm not talking about Mr. Emerson now, but of the whole corps of thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.


"I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow. And never will the pullers-down be able to cope with builders-up ... But enough of this Plato who talks thro' his nose. 


"You complain that Emerson tho' a denizen of the land of gingerbread, is above munching a plain cake in company of jolly fellows, and swigging (?) off his ale like you and me. Ah, my dear Sir, that's his misfortune, not his fault. His belly, Sir, is in his chest, and his brains descend down into his neck, and offer an obstacle to a draughtful of ale or a mouthful of cake... Goodbye. H.M."

"Books Inhabit the World"

Portland author Sallie Tisdale, on her experience judging this year's National Book Awards (via The Oregonian):

"All this reading could be on a gray screen; I could be clicking buttons instead of turning pages. In the bookless future a few of these books predict, there would be no boxes, no piles...

I would, of course, have gone mad, thrown the little plastic thing out the window long ago. The real glory of all these books is simply that they exist. They will endure in the world as solid things. I love the piles -- the teetering, heavy, uneven piles, the cumbersome crowding of books thick and thin. These are piles of piled-up things, sculptured objects taking up room. No gray screen can honor the way font shape and space are designed to convey thought. Books inhabit the world in a way not unlike the way you and I do."

Prime Passages: Cyril Connolly & C.S. Lewis Discuss Some Threats to Literary Appreciation

Connolly was writing seven decades ago, Lewis five, but amid a publishing culture geared almost exclusively toward so-called "upmarket fiction" their views are remarkably relevant.

"Writing is a more impure art than music or painting. It is an art, but it is also the medium in which many millions of inartistic people express themselves, describe their work, sell their goods, justify their conduct, propagate their ideas. It is the vehicle of all business and propaganda. Since it is hard to paint or compose without a certain affection for painting or music, the commercial element—advertisers, illustrators, are recognizable, and in a minority, nor do music and painting appeal to the scientific temperament.

But writing does. It is an art in which the few who practice it for its own sake are being always resented and jostled through its many galleries by the majority who do not. And the deadliest of these are the scientific investigators, clever young men who have themselves failed as artists and who bring only a passionate sterility and a dark, wide-focusing resentment to their examination of creative art. The aim of much of this destructive criticism, though not yet as publicly avowed, is entirely to eliminate the individual style, to banish imaginative beauty and formal art from writing. Prose will not only be as unassuming as good clothes, but as uniform as bad ones." (p.76)

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

…What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort. They are mere professionals. Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. … For such people reading often becomes mere work. The text before them comes to exist not in its own right but simply as raw material; clay out of which they can complete their tale of bricks. Accordingly we often find that in their leisure hours they read, if at all, as the many read. I well remember the snub I once got from a man to whom, as we came away from an examiners’ meeting, I tactlessly mentioned a great poet on whom several candidates had written answers. His attitude (I’ve forgotten the words) might be expressed in the form, ‘Good God, man, do you want to go on after hours?’…For those who are reduced to this condition by economic necessity and overwork I have nothing but sympathy. Unfortunately, ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And, however it is produced, it destroys appreciation." (p.6-7)

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961)

                                                                                               

and Connolly again (same book as above):

"One further question is raised by Maugham. ‘I have never had much patience,’ he states, ‘with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning.’ This is an abject surrender, for it is part of the tragedy of modern literature that the author, anxious to avoid mystifying the reader, is afraid to demand of him any exertions. ‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ he exclaims, ‘I write exactly as I talk—no, better still—exactly as you talk.’ Imagine Cezanne painting or Beethoven composing ‘exactly as he talked’! The only way to write is to consider the reader to be the author’s equal; to treat him otherwise is to set a value on illiteracy, and so all that results from Maugham’s condescension to a reader from whom he expects no effort is a latent hostility." (p.79-80)

The Artist's Work

From my essay "The Artist As Worker," out now in the summer 2010 "Work" issue of Oregon Humanities Magazine:

... In America it has always been the spiritual task of the artist to defend his art to a private self who wished it to be more notable or remunerative; today’s task increasingly means defending one’s art to a culture that expects it to be those things and more.

Whether you come to the desk as a writer in secondhand clothes or a CEO in clover, your prescribed oracle is now the same: the dollar. You have before you, like everybody else, the great playing field of the competitive marketplace. You must put your shoulder to the fray and reap a respectable yearly income—or, failing that, at least amass conspicuous honors, appointments, grants, awards—else admit that what you do is not really work. A hobby, maybe, this words-on-paper business. A spinsterish diversion that is quaint and slightly embarrassing in its Victorian echoes. Not work. Artists of late, enthusiastically subscribing to the “career track,” offer collusion with and reinforcement of the new pragmatism. As Eric Larsen notes in his fulminating treatise A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, “Inner and outer, public and private, artwork and ad, conscience and collaboration” have never been so interchangeable. What is your mission statement? What are your credentials? Art-making, we’re all led to understand, is not a way of life, a calling, a sacrificial act—we’ve grown up since the age of Rilke’s Europe, of mollycoddling “the imagination”; we’ve learned self-respect. Red-eyed, brain-sore, hunchbacked novelist, ask thy bank account whether you’re wasting your time; ask thy “reputation;” heed their replies. Doth they whisper: “Earn thy MFA!” “Get thee a teaching job!” “Network more!” Then jump to it or jump ship.

Says critic Lee Siegel in his book Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination, “The general anxiety now is that if you don’t have a gallery, a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind…. Instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work … toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine.” Siegel’s bright-eyed hankerer, to continue an admittedly hyperbolic tone, is a capitalist stand-in for the spirited artist of old—a kind of new literary forty-niner, brain ablaze with Fifth Avenue rumors of the latest Big Deal, the who’s who of agents, bestseller lists and film options, eager to demonstrate the skills of self-promotion, of being interesting—or even better, incendiary—in interviews. I find it hard to imagine the injunction of John Keats, one of literary history’s great unprivileged, having any relevance in such a racket: “The genius of Poetry [read: art] must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself—that which is creative must create itself.” ...

Behind the Flap

Last night while reading this first edition library copy of Nicholson Baker's U and I, I was delighted to find a tiny artifact peeking from behind the book's rear flap...
It was a fortune cookie strip: "All progress occurs because people dare to be different."


More of a proverb than a fortune, really, like the contents of most fortune cookies these days -- but how appropriate for Baker's book. And what an affecting reminder of the tangible, material, solitary, and yet simultaneously and mysteriously interpersonal joys that only books in tactile, material (non-digital) form can afford.

Prime Passage: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of Joseph Brodsky (1987)

"Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. ... Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view, postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet, should make use of the language of the street, the language of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this case, literature, to history. It is only if we have resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt in his development that literature should speak the language of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak the language of literature."

E-Reading Device? Not For This Young Bibliophile

Twenty-six-year-old Emma Silvers writes in Salon about refusing to give up regular old books in favor of pixels on a screen. This is an excellent contrarian perspective from a member of a generation we're trained to believe wants everything in electronic, virtual form.

"...For me, to deny books their physical structure simply ignores far too much of what makes them enjoyable. The commitment they require, the way they force you into a state of simultaneous calm and focus -- these are things I have yet to duplicate by any other means. Not to mention other factors that I'm terrified have been lost in the transition from paperback to screen: the mood it puts you in to carry a particular book in your bag all day, or the giddy/strange feeling of seeing your favorites on someone else's shelves...."

Prime Passage: The Vivisector by Patrick White (1970)

About the artist-protagonist Hurtle Duffield:

"Suddenly he had begun to live the life for which he had been preparing, or for which he might even have been prepared. At the end of the years of watching, of blundering around inside an inept body, of thinking, or rather, endlessly changing coloured slides in the magic-lantern of the mind, the body had become an instrument, the crude, blurred slides were focusing into what might be called a vision. Most of the day he now spent steadily painting, mostly destroying, but sometimes amazed by a detail which mightn’t have been his, yet didn’t seem to be anybody else’s. There were one or two canvases he had dared keep, in which dreams and facts had locked in an architecture which did not appear alterable. When his fingers weren’t behaving as the instruments of his power, they returned to being the trembling reeds he had grown up with. If he had not been dependent on Nance Lightfoot for ‘any little luxuries’ he might have taken to drink or smoke, and trembled more violently than he did. His nightly journeys through the deserted store, through the smells of virgin drapery, floor-wax, ammonia, and his own sweat, exhausted and prepared him for the next ordeal. ¶ Because next morning remained an ordeal: he was so flabby, frightened that his only convincing self might not take over from him at the easel." (p.204)

25 Ways E-Readers Can't Beat the Old-Fashioned Book

The iPad landed and techno-enthusiasts everywhere hurried, once again, to put on their coroner hats and issue preemptive reports on the death of the old-fashioned book. Now, it may be a different matter for those who crave, in books, the same button-punching dazzle offered by their gadgetry, but to this whisper-of-the-pages-loving reader all the declaiming of late seems a little, um, declamatory.

Before we cue Taps, let's step away from the media juggernaut, take a deep breath of reason, and recall a few (just a few!) of the attributes, consistently neglected in the now-daily hubbub, that continue to make the old-fashioned book not only a viable technology, but, well, a profoundly wonderful one we really don't want to lose.

1 . The book unites delivery device and content. E-readers, drained of battery power, revert to hunks of plastic.

2. The book begets libraries and independent bookstores, irreplaceable bastions of culture and community.

3. The book, beyond cover price, comes with no proprietary fee. Your preferred e-reader sets you back $250 to $500.

4. The book is not an inventory portal, therefore not subject to proprietary restrictions in content; i.e.: Due to licensing or discretionary considerations, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley cannot be downloaded to this e-reading device. (Think this is a joke? “Last week…the creators of a Web comic version of the classic novel, called “Ulysses Seen,” said that Apple required them to remove any images containing nudity before the comic was approved as an application for the iPad.” –New York Times, June 13, 2010)*

5. The book is not a brand, therefore free from functional limitations imposed by a manufacturer; i.e.: The e-book you’re requesting is not supported by your e-reader’s operating system. Upgrade to our newest e-reader or follow this link to our checkout to download OS-2011.5.

6. The book withstands excessive dust, direct sunlight, splashed soup, or dropped potatoes.

7. The book is hard to eradicate except by fire. Is any e-reading device likely to reach — with zero loss of content — an age comparable to civilization’s oldest incunabula?

8. The book, presented as gift, shows regard for the recipient’s tastes, being a single selection and/or bearing the giver’s handwritten inscription.

9. The book can be autographed by its author.

10. The book, by conspicuous display of title and/or author, occasions conversation between mutually inclined strangers.

11. The book may be safely read in the bath.

12. The book relieves you of the screen in an age of relentless screen-media assaults upon the eye.

13. The book is not an immediate access point for innumerable diversions (e-mail, video games, etc.).

14. The book’s printed editions are traceably distinct, a defense against manipulations of fact or history.

15. The book does not “transmit and receive,” except in mysterious ways. No need to fear an Orwellian eye embedded in the page.

16. The book cannot be “swiped remotely” by the powers that be.

17. The book’s publisher may go broke without imperiling access to additional content.

18. The book, bought second-hand or borrowed, yields up fascinating ephemera: grocery lists, love notes, locks of hair, receipts, etc., bringing the reader into poignant contact with an unknown fellow human being.

19. The book complements your mantelpiece.

20. The book boasts many practical uses beyond communication (as furniture, makeshift stairs, etc.). E-readers — oddly shaped and breakable — are as obsolescent as other computer junk once they quit working.

21. The book is not invariably manufactured in China.

22. The book accommodates ingenuity of format: children’s books, art books, illuminated texts, pop-up books, fold-out maps, etc.

23. The book makes a meaningful heirloom.

24. The book may be safely left unattended on the beach. As gizmo it is not a hot steal.

25. The book is not a shopping cart.

*UPDATE: June 16, 2010 — Apple recants. Still, a defender of literature this does not make.

ADDENDUM: “Whether, for the future humanist reader, the book in its present form will remain unchanged is in come ways an idle question. My guess (but it is no more than a guess) is that by and large it will not be transformed drastically because it has adapted so well to our requirements — though these, indeed, may change…

“The question I ask myself instead is this: In these new technological spaces, with these artifacts that will certainly coexist with (and in some cases supplant) the book, how will we succeed in still being able to invent, to remember, to learn, to record, to reject, to wonder, to exult, to subvert, to rejoice? By what means will we continue to be creative readers instead of passive viewers?…

“Just as a certain text is never expressed identically in different tongues, books and electronic memories, like electronic memories and the memories we hold in our mind, are different creatures and possess different natures, even when the text they carry is the same. …They are instruments of particular kinds, and their qualities serve diverse purposes in our attempt to know the world. Therefore any opposition that forces us to eliminate one of them is worse than false: it is useless.” --Alberto Manguel, A Reader on Reading (Yale University Press 2010)

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Underworld by Don DeLillo

The graffiti artists of 1970s New York City...

"But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can't know the feelings a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the back streets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can't not see us anymore, you can't not know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we're getting fame, we ain't ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living in them even if you don't see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can't stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face--like I'm your movie, motherfucker." pg.441