Reading Rainbow

On last Monday’s Colbert Report, the author Ann Patchett explained the incentive behind opening a bookstore in Nashville, supposedly filling a local demand that’s been otherwise drained by arbitrary, nebulous corporate decisions. I have some problems with this woman’s professed mission. For one thing, the “larger issues” contention doesn’t follow her claim that one of the huge bookstores that formerly existed was independent. She says that the other was a Borders, which has gone completely bankrupt and no longer exists anywhere. So it seems misleading when she claims that both of the businesses were profitable “every month they were open.” But it’s also off-putting that she would hype her own venture in such a mercenary way:

Colbert’s Reaganite character challenges her by asserting that “the market had spoken” but she is convinced, in that lofty, ethereal way self-righteous aesthetes get, of the purity of her mission: “I want some place to take my kids for story hour on Saturday.” The argument is that the techno-capitalist cycle has reached its functional zenith, and now people just need something, in an extra-commercial sense, with soul. The community culture wants to exist, in other words, outside of the terms of the consumer culture. This is all very good and sensible… or, it would be, if lending libraries didn’t exist. In high school we’re taught that the proliferation of modern public libraries in America occurred as a byproduct of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s particular compulsion. (He gave away nearly his entire self-made fortune toward library construction and similar philanthropy.) They’re in almost every town in the country; they’re filled with hardworking, passionate librarians who do everything they can to establish such programs and promote reading and book circulation to their respective communities. In the late 19^th century, inter-library loan—made even more sophisticated by complex computer systems a century later—was put in place to further the availability of published materials, for free, to any person who requested them.

I’m unconvinced that the financial or systematic obstructions libraries may face in the modern era would in any significant way be remedied by a re-popularization of independent book stores. How could they be? A store is a place whose purpose is to further the capitalist accumulation of wealth in exchange for goods. The structured advocacy of reading it might adopt is ultimately an instrument to that mission and it could never theoretically eclipse that of public libraries, however bureaucratically compromised they may become. So isn’t what bookstore activists like Pratchett promote as a noble extension of intellectual preservation really little more than an opportunist appeal to the liberal inclinations of the socially limited bourgeois?

I don’t happen to have an affinity for bookstores. I’ve never gotten caught up in some intimate conference about this or that author or topic, or even been directed toward something I might like with warm deference. I go to a store when I want to buy something or just kill time browsing; I pick out whatever I want and then provide the required amount of money, somehow without infusing some romance of character into the proceedings. Is there something wrong with me?  I feel that any time somebody rhapsodizes about being a customer or employee at his or her own little hometown shop it’s with a kind of detached elitism, as though admitting the materialist truth of free-market business would evaporate the personalized specialness of their experience. Pratchett’s big argument of superiority over internet shopping— with Amazon the literal Philistine Goliath to her David—is the guaranteed presence of “smart people,” as though a bookstore were a kind of utopian salon catered to your individualist needs while the anonymous online reviews remain a gallery of belching illiterates. We know what she means, but it’s still an asshole thing to say, her attitude snide and self-aggrandizing in the worst way. When she warns against favoring virtual experiences over tactile ones with a patronizing (and idiotic) premonition—“if you never ever talk to people and you meet all of your needs on the internet, you wake up one day and you’re the Unabomber”—it’s met with a laugh, though one of accord or incredulity it’s hard to tell. (Colbert, never at a loss for repartee, is stunned speechless for a moment.) Much as I admire her balls for touting her business choice by basically saying consumers are ignorant little shits, it doesn’t do wonders for her thesis. The truth about modern book culture is that, as a kind of survival tactic in the boorish Internet age, it’s invariably encountered as a prejudiced, exclusionary thing: I remember reading a piece in a local cultural review a decade ago featuring the woeful tale of a literate youth who got a job at Borders expecting a bohemian dream only to find, to his horror, uninformed customers asking for music and books other than the specific, classy ones he liked. The thought! What a travesty that this Socratic Eden of cultivated taste turned out to just be a place that sold goods for legal tender. If only he’d worked at a nice little corner shop, away from the purview of such undesirables.

Hey, look at that.

In recent years, the image of literacy presented via the mouthpiece of celebrity has, troublingly but understandably, confused just having things with being into them. The point of books, which is to become interested in what they contain, is conflated with the superficial aesthetics of lifestyle. On Cribs, Moby laments the lack of bookshelves exhibited on the MTV program and then shows the camera to his own stack in his ugly, sterile loft, filled with schmancy gilded editions of old faves like The Hobbit, which, you know, I’m sure he reads a chapter of in between every bleep-bloop remix and vegan recipe composition.  A few months ago I saw a photo floating around my Facebook feed of John Waters in his house, surrounded by stacks and stacks of books. The caption: “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.”

Now, there are many reasons why a woman I bring home to my door-less, clothes-strewn bedroom shouldn’t fuck me. None of them is that I don’t have packed shelves of books ostentatiously arrayed about the edges of the room. John Waters, you’ll recall, is the filmmaker who once directed an actor to flex his exposed anus at the camera, so of course I can appreciate his discerning attitude vis-à-vis taste, but I don’t share it. If somebody doesn’t have books, it doesn’t mean anything other than that they don’t buy books. Come to think of it, with the mainstream marketing of futurey tablets and e-readers that’s come to pass in the last couple of years, it doesn’t mean that, either—somebody could have a thousand books in their house invisible to you as they sit in a microchip tucked under a dust-cover in the corner. In any case, having books says nothing in particular about a human being, except in a superficial sense—and hey, we’re all superficial in some way about the people we want to sleep with. So what the hell does he really mean?

I read. Not a ton, probably not enough, but I do, and this is how: I go to the library and pick out one or two books. Then I read them, return them, and borrow different books. I have a small pile of texts in my possession, gifts and college remnants and the occasional impulse purchase, but they sit apart from the “active” stable in my domicile and occupy no portion of my literary life. Apart from books that you know you’ll want to re-read or refer to continually as your life progresses, owning books serves no purpose other than to ornament your abode, consciously illustrating a lifestyle that may or may not be for real. What Waters really means when he says that books—physical books, not “reading”—should be cool is that people should look cool by adorning their lives with them as fetish objects. His aim might be to make people more interesting, but it’s not the same thing. I’m not saying there’s not correlation between owning books and wanting to read, but it’s not the same goddamn thing. One of my current roommates is the biggest reader I’ve ever met. I’ve seen his bedroom in his parents’ house, the walls literally covered floor to ceiling with thousands of tomes collected over the years at sales and musty shops all over the land. He reads and reads day in and out, for school and his own satisfaction, but it’s not neurologically possible for him to have read all those books he has in his life thus far. He just likes them; they comfort him. That’s great. But it’s not the same thing.

I happen to share a fragment of that fetish, and when combined with familiarity of habit I like reading physical books very much. But if e-readers or brain implants or whatever new tech appendage enables people to read literature more expediently and makes them excited to do so, how could there be anything wrong with that? If you disagree, isn’t it more that something is wrong with you? Aren’t you not so much about reading as you are anxious about the relevancy of your image—or, on the matter of bookstore revival, the commercial status quo? Which, you know, I get it. I mean, with the abundance of leisure distractions growing exponentially by the minute, the publishing industry isn’t what it used to be. If it dies, then new, mass-available books die. And I don’t have any illusions that I’m helping it out too much by getting all my reading from the library. Nor, for that matter, with purchases: the best bookstore in my town is a used vendor, and unless I am not privy to some vast, extra-capitalist network of trade, I believe used book sales do absolutely nothing for the modern book industry, and only exist to further their own survival. But, hey, I just graduated from a liberal arts school, so I barely have money for food right now. When I’ve become rich by blogging about frivolous shit that annoys me, I’ll pick up a new hardcover every week, I promise. Until then, don’t assume you know what I’m about just because I don’t have tree pulp bursting from every orifice. I’ll never be as cool as John Waters, but not because I don’t sleep on a bed of bound paper.

Edit: Please take a look at the below comments from my good friends Jake and Sylvia, who add informed qualifications and perspective to my truculent ramblings.