In addition to Kagi’s Smallweb and Ooh, previously mentioned here, I’ve recently discovered more aggregators aimed at promoting posts by personal blogs: Scour, Blogosphere, Ye Olde Blogroll, and Bubbles. It’s nice to see an interest in the old ways of internetting, but I admit to feeling a bit like a tribesman deep in the jungle noticing the anthropologists starting to come around.
Outis Niemand
About Outis Niemand
Posts by Outis Niemand:
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XXIV)
Inspired by my enjoyment of Irwin Edman’s Under Whatever Sky (thanks again to Isaac Waisberg), I set about with my faithful chatbot/bloodhound to track down more practitioners of the “mid-century middlebrow” genre of essay-writing that I love so much. I found an E.B. White collection at the library sale, and found Joseph Wood Krutch, Christopher Morley, J.B. Priestley, and the Fadiman father-daughter duo online. I had not read any of Clifton’s books before, other than a compilation of anecdotes he edited, but I was already a fan of Anne’s previous two books of familiar essays, so I was delighted to find that she had just released a new one in February.
Ceremonies of Regard
One of the things Nietzsche despised in Socrates was the latter’s confidence that whatever mattered in life ought to be rendered fully conscious, fully explicit, fully defensible. Reason at any price. Whatever could not survive cross-examination in the bright glare of dialectic was made to look shabby or confused. But a lot of ordinary moral knowledge exists first as caution, custom, proverb, and taboo. It is condensed experience before it becomes explicit theory. Only later, if pressed by some bright interrogator, does someone try to unpack the logic hiding inside it. And sometimes the unpacking is clumsy. That doesn’t mean the intuition was empty. There is something shallow in the dialectical move that says, “Aha, you cannot define or justify this cleanly, therefore you do not really know it.” No. Very often the average person knows the shape of a danger before the intellectual has finished naming it.
Which brings us to our featured tweet. Pace Rob Henderson, who lamented this as another example of an undying “luxury belief,” I see this as reason for good cheer. It seems that prestigious media outlets are backing away from their enthusiastic advocacy of polyamory in recent years to something more modest: unrequited crushes on other people. You might say they’re microdosing polyamory now. Sure, they’re still self-centered boors (and bores) who can’t tolerate any restraints on their endlessly fascinating self-expression, but at least they’re being a little more passive about it now.
Of course, merely noticing other attractive people is banal. Almost everyone with functioning eyes already knows that. What makes this genre irritating is the way it tries to inflate that ordinary fact into a badge of enlightened sophistication. The point is not, “married people are still human.” The point is, “we are the kind of evolved couple who can metabolize this with chic candor.” That’s where the faint whiff of poly ideology lingers. Not full polyamory, just the moral vanity of wanting to seem less possessive, less bourgeois, less square than the rubes. It is polyamory for people who want the aesthetic of sexual adventurousness without the administrative burden, jealousy spiral, and wreckage.
The average married couple has already worked out, without an essay in a prestige outlet, that attraction doesn’t cease at the altar. They have also usually worked out something else obvious to those not blinded by ideology: where attention goes, feeling often follows. Some subjects are better handled with discretion than with performative openness. Not because they are Victorians, but because they are adults. Nobody is scandalized by incidental perception, as opposed to cultivated attention. You see an attractive person; you register it; life goes on. What raises eyebrows is when someone starts lingering over it, discussing it, theorizing it, and then publicizing that whole process as a mark of health or honesty. At that point, the issue is: why are you feeding this? Why are you watering this plant?
Ordinary people’s suspicion is often wiser than the essayist’s self-exoneration. They understand that not everything dangerous begins with an overt act. A lot of it begins with permission, rehearsal, indulgence, and narrative self-flattery. People know, even if they cannot state it in therapeutic jargon, that attention is not neutral. Attention is investment. Repeated attention is cultivation.
I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.— Pablo Neruda, “The Queen”
What self-centered candor misses is that many of the things holding ordinary life together are not strict factual disclosures but small ceremonial acts of respect. A husband who does not feel obliged to narrate every passing attraction to his wife is not being “dishonest” in any meaningful sense. When he calls his wife gorgeous even though she looks disheveled at that moment, he is performing a tiny courtesy, a way of signaling where his loyalties and priorities lie. Social life is full of such gestures. We say “sorry” when someone bumps into us in the grocery store not because we are confessing guilt, but because it’s a graceful way of acknowledging the awkwardness and smoothing it over. In the same way, a tactful silence in marriage is not repression but consideration: a way of saying, without pedantic explanation, that other people may exist, and they may even be beautiful, but they are not important here. Self-centered candor, by contrast, is crude rather than brave. It dissolves these little ceremonies of regard in the acid of explicitness, and then wonders why the world feels flatter, colder, and less loved.
Pedicabo Ego Vos
I find reading savage reviews like reading pornography; though I often enjoy them, I feel a bit ashamed of myself for doing so.
— W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book
****
Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets a tremendous erection.
— Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
****
In the previous post, we considered David Bell’s lament for the supposed death of the book review. He saw the practice as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, one of the great civilizing mechanisms of modern intellectual life. Auden is more candid, and Lichtenberg more candid still. Beneath aspirational paeans to “the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression” and “open, passionate, critical debate” lies a baser pleasure, decorously concealed like so many apocryphal piano legs under miniature Victorian trousers. Catullus, Juvenal, and even that old quack Freud would have understood: underneath the facade of propriety, what the critic really wants is to irrumate his rival in print. Apocryphal Oscar Wilde says that everything is about sex except sex, which is about power. Savage reviews appear to be that happy middle territory where sex and power stop pretending to be different things. What is best in life, Conan the Book Reviewer? “To eviscerate your enemy’s bestseller, to sodomize his prose in the Quarterly, and to hear the lamentations of his blurbers.”
Fever In the Swamps of Reason
The modern book review was born with the Enlightenment and it expressed key Enlightenment values: a commitment to the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, free of censorship; a belief in open, passionate, critical debate; and, above all, a dedication to making the results of this exploration and debate accessible to a broad general public. It is no coincidence that the book review, as a cultural phenomenon, is in steep decline, at the moment when the last gleams of the Enlightenment itself increasingly recall the unsteady flickers of a guttering candle.
This reminded me of something from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books:
I regard reviews as a kind of childhood illness to which newborn books are subject to a greater or lesser degree. There are instances of the soundest dying of them, while the feeble often come through. Many don’t catch them at all. Attempts have often been made to ward them off with the aid of amulets of prefaces and dedications, or even to inoculate them with self-criticisms, but this doesn’t always work.
Bell writes about the book review as though it were one of the Enlightenment’s noblest offspring: a vehicle of free inquiry, rational criticism, and public instruction, now fading along with the civilization that produced it. There is something appealing in that picture, but also something a little too tidy. Lichtenberg, after all, was not a belated cynic looking back on the Enlightenment from the ruins. He was there, and he saw something more comic than the serene operation of public reason.
Bell gives us the Enlightenment’s self-image, or rather our nostalgic reconstruction of its self-image: criticism as a noble institution in the service of truth and the educated public. Lichtenberg gives us the Enlightenment’s self-knowledge: the recognition that even in an age devoted to reason, literary life remained vulnerable to fashion, chance, vanity, overreaction, and all the other crooked timber of human judgment. Bell sees the review as an instrument of civilization; Lichtenberg sees it as one more reminder that civilization never abolishes human folly, but merely refines its forms.
The imagery makes the contrast even better. For Bell, the book review is born with the Enlightenment. For Lichtenberg, books are the newborns, and reviews are the random illnesses they catch. Bell sees a candle of reason guttering in our barbarous age. Lichtenberg seems to say the candle always flickered, because the draft was human nature itself. He punctures, in four lines, the sentimental habit of imagining that there was once a golden age when criticism was mostly rational, public-spirited, and sane. There was no such age. There were only the usual humans following the same mixed motives. Bell, like many today, is lamenting the loss of a media ecosystem that offered more status to writers and intellectuals — in hindsight, at least.
He is not merely lamenting that books are no longer discussed in public. They plainly are. People on YouTube, podcasts, Substack, Goodreads, Reddit, and niche blogs talk about books constantly. What he is really lamenting is the weakening of a particular kind of public discussion: centralized, salaried, institutionally validated, and conducted by people whose judgments carried inherited prestige. Under the older model, a fairly small class of critics and editors stood at the chokepoints of literary attention. They did not just discuss books; they conferred seriousness. Their judgments arrived with the aura of metropolitan authority, cultivated taste, and cultural office. When Bell writes in that elegiac register, part of what he misses is not only a forum, but a world in which certain people got to speak from on high and be recognized as doing so.
That does not mean his complaint is wholly fake. Something real has been lost: editorial discipline, a common venue, the expectation that a serious review might be read by a general educated public rather than by a micro-tribe. But the sepia filter kicks in when that loss gets translated into a broader civilizational lament, as though ordinary readers discussing books online do not count because they lack the old voice, costume, and prestige markers. A woman on YouTube giving a shrewd ten-minute discussion of a novel, or hundreds of readers hashing out reactions on Goodreads, may produce less “gravitas,” but that doesn’t warrant portentous proclamations of “the death of reviews.”
535*
We can therefore imagine what enthusiasm the ancients must have felt, who without any question found themselves in a habitual state of physical vigor, much superior to our normal state.
— Leopardi, Zibaldone
A 535 block pull last night. I had to use my figure-8 straps for the first time in a long while; my grip started to slip on the previous rep at 525. The blocks give you a 5-6 inch head start from the floor. Similar to last week’s chain squats, these allow you to move heavier weights through a shorter range of motion. It doesn’t count as a PR, of course, because it’s not a full deadlift. But that’s coming soon.
Peach Tree and Redbuds
Peach tree and redbuds—
two weeks of reckless color
before green takes over
How Could I Endure Not to Be a God?
A specter is haunting the world. No, that is not quite right. Specter suggests something that was once a living human, but what concerns us today is the presence of something nonhuman—or even antihuman—that threatens to replace or dominate us. There is no single technology or movement responsible for this insidiously hostile takeover, but we are confronted with new evidence of it almost every day
This was a great read. One of the essay’s best ideas is that many apparently-opposite projects are secretly twins: longevity cults and euthanasia expansion, enhancement and optimization, safetyism and transcendence. All are trying to get out from under the burden of finitude. He sees that a world obsessed with removing suffering can become deeply anti-human, not because suffering is good in itself, but because some forms of struggle, dependence, decay, ambiguity, and mortality are constitutive rather than accidental. Remove all of that and you do not get purified humanity, you get something…different. Worse, perhaps, or even alien.
I might argue that he sometimes treats “humanist intuition” as though it were more unified and reliable than it really is. Our intuitions are real, but they are not self-interpreting. Plenty of people have perfectly sincere intuitions in favor of IVF, cosmetic enhancement, antidepressants, testosterone, Ozempic, neural prosthetics, hearing aids, fertility treatment, and so on. Once you admit that some technological mediation is compatible with human flourishing, the hard part is drawing the line. And that is where the essay is strongest rhetorically but weakest analytically. It is very good at making you feel the creepiness of embryo selection, Neuralink-for-children, AGI worship, or longevity monomania. It is less precise about what principle separates acceptable aid from deforming redesign.
That kind of goes with the territory. The contemplative mind is good at seeing complexity, ambiguity, tragic tradeoffs, the mixed character of human goods. But that very depth of vision often makes it politically and institutionally weak. It hesitates. It qualifies. It wallows in epochē and aporia. Erasmus loses to Luther; Montaigne loses to the manager; the essayist loses to the product team. The people with the strongest feel for the mystery of the human are often the least equipped to legislate for it. Meanwhile the engineers, administrators, investors, activists, and clinicians do not need a complete account of “the human.” They only need a local problem and a locally persuasive solution. How do we reduce suffering here? increase choice here? improve outcomes here? enhance capacity here? lower risk here? And so the world gets remade not by philosopher-kings but by a thousand practical people making narrow decisions inside systems that reward intervention.
That, to me, is the bleakest implication here: the anti-human outcome may not come from anyone explicitly hating humanity. It may come from a civilization of partial problem-solvers, each acting reasonably within his capacity, while the cumulative effect is to dissolve the background conditions that made human life intelligible in the older sense. Nobody has to say, “Let us abolish the human.” It is enough that nobody feels authorized to defend any limit that cannot be justified in procedural, therapeutic, or economic terms.
There is also a latent theological problem in the essay, and he seems aware of it. If you really want a strong argument that the human is inviolable and not merely improvable material, secular humanism often does look a bit under-armed. Polansky has clearly been thinking along those lines elsewhere, where he suggests religion may become “the last bastion of humanism” because it can underwrite limits that secular materialism struggles to justify. But as always, I’m suspicious of these mostly-secular attempts to reverse-engineer a facsimile of genuine faith into existence. It is never clear what, exactly, is being proposed. A political alliance of convenience between secular humanists and believers based on the common enemy of hubristic techno-optimizers? An exhortation to nonbelievers to go through the old religious motions in the hope that habit will ripen into conviction? A private discipline undertaken for one’s own salvation, or a public performance meant to influence peers and steady society? And if religion is only admitted to be “directionally correct,” what is to stop the modern analytical mind from taking it apart, trimming it down, and adapting it to its own preferences?
I find myself thinking of James Madison, and not merely because I almost picked up a biography of him at a library sale yesterday. Any solution to this dilemma will probably be Madisonian in design — it would assume that the Promethean impulse to mastery, redesign, optimization, and transgression is permanent, and then ask how to divide it, slow it, and force it to collide with rival impulses before it can remake the world unopposed. If I knew what that would specifically look like, I suppose I’d be someone important and not a lowly blogger.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XXIII)
Library sale this weekend! We took a friend and had a great time introducing her to the used-book sale subculture.
Petit Bonheur
Well, the way things are going in the world — the way, one might say, that they have always gone — it might be well to settle for the small happiness, the little joy. I think Montaigne would have been on my side, and Epicurus and Ecclesiastes — the last-named because he was quite despairing of any long or large felicity. The French have always specialized in the petit bonheur: the small omelette, the little wine, the intimate foyer of enjoyment. The English have celebrated it, too. Austin Dobson was one of the prophets of this moderate aspiration:
Here in this sequestered close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose.Rupert Brooke, homesick for Grantchester, the tranquil village near Cambridge, asked:
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?And the small pleasures that make a tempered happiness persisted in an older Germany, long after that unhappy land had gone in for bigness and empire.
Is it sour grapes to settle for the little happiness: to aim to make happiness out of the most modest ingredients: little things lovingly collected, simple meals in modest surroundings with unpretentious friends, discoursing, perhaps, on not too grand ideas? Is the little happiness cherishable only because, as one grows older, neither private ecstasy nor public utopias seem any longer feasible? Do we tell ourselves the unspectacular moments satisfy only because all moments are threatened, because even gentle goods — like honey for tea in England — cannot be taken for granted any longer? How many millions in the world would now compound for the petit bonheur! Included among those millions, no doubt, the readers of this meditation — and its author.
— Irwin Edman, Under Whatever Sky
Via Isaac Waisberg, I’ve been enjoying Edman’s book recently. It’s a perfect example of a beloved genre I think of as “mid-century middlebrow.” Intelligent, reflective writing, free of academic longueurs or social-science frameworks. There is something deeply civilized in the old middlebrow manner at its best: the easy traffic with books, the unforced assumption that Montaigne or Ecclesiastes or Rupert Brooke might simply turn up in the course of reflection, as naturally as a remembered conversation. Not scholarship as display, but reading as seasoning. One feels that these writers had lived with their books long enough for them to become part of the furniture of the mind. The effect is not pedantry but a kind of cultivated naturalness — the sense that thought has been enriched by literature without becoming clogged by it.
Ad Hoc, Ad Lib, Ad Nauseum
“What do you think of Niebuhr’s theology, of the new president of Vassar, of the future of air transportation, of book clubs, of the new women’s hats, of Truman’s chances in 1948, of the nature of happiness?” At the drop of a hat, or of the handkerchief of the lady who asks the question, I would blush not to have a reply. And like many others, I become so absorbed in developing the music and dialectic of my answer that I have no time to blush at the fatuities the answer may contain.
— Irwin Edman, Under Whatever Sky
****
I now think of my urge to consume news not as an adaptation to the modern world, but as a vestige of our ancient past.
This urge was evolved at a time where information was scarce, and therefore, highly valuable. It makes sense that a hunger for all the information one can find is advantageous—even lifesaving.
Other human urges—for sugar and fat for example—evolved in a time of scarcity too. But we know now, and readily accept, that eating enormous meals of carbs and fat is a bad thing.
A similar thing is happening for information flow—but unlike food, there is little credence given to the idea that it might be bad for us. In fact, we actively encourage the habit, leading to the equivalent of a diet full of junk food: A diet of 24 hours news.
****
The chattering classes are forever congratulating themselves on the nobility of their inclinations. The vulgar man comes home from work, opens a beer, and watches sports; the cultivated professional comes home from work, opens his phone, and gorges on headlines, podcasts, opinion columns, panel shows, and algorithmically dispensed indignation. One is supposed to be “mere consumption,” the other a form of civic virtue. Vanity, vanity; it’s all vanity. The sports fan at least knows he is being entertained. The news addict imagines he is performing citizenship.
What does this elevated consumption usually yield? Not knowledge in any deep or chastening sense, but the kind of patched-together opinion Edman describes: a few skimmed articles, a half-heard broadcast, some conversational lint picked up from peers, all hastily assembled into a position that must now be displayed as proof of seriousness. It’s amazing how quickly people learn to build an identity around this. A man who could not tell you, yesterday, what he thought about some distant political question will, by tonight, be defending his freshly improvised view as though it were an heirloom. The more fluently we talk, the more we mistake fluency for depth, which is a constant temptation for the verbally dextrous, conceptually agile person. The more publicly we state a thing, the more we feel obliged to stand by it. And once a view has become entangled with self-presentation, any challenge to it feels like a challenge to rank, intelligence, and dignity. At that point, the actual merits of the opinion barely matter. If we were truly honest, most attempts to elicit an opinion from us on important issues would be answered with “Hell if I know; I haven’t thought much about it.” But that would be social death for this class, a figurative punchbowl-defecation.
To go ahead and put too fine a point on it, news consumption is how educated professionals assure themselves of their own seriousness and importance. Like most human activity, it is about showing off for their peers, while positioning themselves favorably in comparison to the outgroup — in this case, those uncredentialed misinformation-guzzling swine who are derelict in their duty to “defend democracy” as it dies in darkness. Crucially, though, as Leopardi noted, this sort of illusion is necessary if these poor souls are to be capable of functioning without collapsing into nihilism. Only “half-philosophers” follow the proselytizing urge to enlighten others, whether they asked for it or not. We should not seek to cure our betters of their consumption habits, because they would only fill the void with another enthusiasm, possibly even a worse one. We, however, are insignificant enough to allow ourselves amusement at their expense.
Chains Chains Chains
When lifting a heavy weight: if you give it your all, the result will depend on external circumstances. But if you don’t, then it will depend on you.
(When you give your utmost, you do not need to make a superhuman effort; if you don’t, you will reach exactly your level. “He put in a superhuman effort.” I certainly believe it—from the negligible results I concluded that he wanted to force things above and outside himself instead of engaging, investing himself completely.)
— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation
Heavy chain squats this week. This is 315 in plates, and the chains add another 130 at the top of the movement. These are a good way to practice handling maximal weight, because the chains let you feel the full load at the top while reducing some of it in the bottom position as they settle on the floor. That makes them useful for walkout practice, balance, bracing, and exploding upward with force, while also helping you get neurologically accustomed to heavier weights. I did one regular squat a couple weeks ago at 455, which pushed me to my limit; these allowed me to do two sets of three reps, with 445 on my back at the top of each rep. Plus, chain squats have the aesthetic advantage that they sound magnificent — clanking and rattling the whole way, like the lift is taking place in a dungeon rather than a gym.
The Spirit Is Anti-AI, But the Flesh Uses Claude
When Paul Kingsnorth launched his Writers Against AI campaign, Alan Jacobs’s response was glib: “I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.” The pledge itself was not vague. It asked writers for three things: to promise that they would not use AI in their work as writers, would not support writers who did, and would support only entirely human-made work. A bright line, in other words — until Jacobs noticed that his own use might place a toe on the wrong side of it.
His is not some trivial edge case. Running dictation through Claude to punctuate and clean it is part of the writing process. Uploading six years of idea journals to Claude for thematic analysis, triage, and recovery of unwritten projects is part of the writing process. In plain English, he is using AI as a low-level editorial and developmental assistant. You can easily argue that’s legitimate. I certainly think so. I think many sane people would say it is. But if so, then the campaign he endorsed was foolishly fundamentalist from the start.
He writes, after acknowledging that he does not meet the pledge “by the letter,” “I’m okay with that.” Of course he is. The problem is not that he changed his mind; we should always encourage that. The problem is that he helped advertise a standard of suspicion first, and only afterwards granted himself the interpretive charity it denied to others. Moral severity for thee, exemptions for me: that is how these things always go.
Actually, let me revise that. I don’t think he changed his mind, because I don’t think he thought much about it in the first place. His earlier endorsement was a knee-jerk impulse; once he finally considered it carefully, he realized it was more complicated. He did not first weigh the structure of the campaign, its incentives, its likely abuses, its presumption of suspicion, and then revise his view. He seems to have begun with the gratifying emotional impulse — Down with AI — and only afterwards noticed the practical difficulties. It is a small but exquisite irony that the author of How to Think apparently endorsed a public anti-AI pledge before thinking through whether he himself could satisfy it.
Personally, I couldn’t care less if, or how, writers use AI. I just think that if you’re going to lend your voice to a public shaming/cancellation ritual, you owe it to the likely victims to spend a few minutes thinking about exactly what it is you’re supporting. The problems with this sort of campaign were obvious from the start, even to an idiot like me. A public pledge with no cost to entry is tailor-made for empty grandstanding and virtue-signaling. That is exactly the kind of thing a seasoned academic, especially one old enough to have watched a dozen waves of performative moralism sweep through institutions, ought to recognize on sight. The status incentives were obvious. The temptation to furtive noncompliance was obvious. The drift toward bot-hunting and guilt-by-aesthetic-association was obvious. None of this required prophetic powers. It just required a functioning sense of how public righteousness works.
You do expect this sort of thoughtless moral enthusiasm from excitable young people who still imagine that public declarations are the same thing as judgment. From a sixty-something Christian humanist, you expect some tragic sense — some awareness that campaigns of purity do not stay pure, that standards weaponized against bad people are soon applied promiscuously, and that people are often least reliable precisely when they are enjoying the sensation of being obviously right.
Bibliomisia
Bibliomisia — hatred of books — is a silent epidemic in our society, ignored by social scientists, overlooked by the professional awareness-raisers, bereft of bumper magnets and national days of commemoration. Don’t believe me? Then listen to how proudly these people display their abusive tendencies, with no hint of shame. Don’t look away, I beg you. Bear witness with me.
First, Bill Hayes:
As I went through Oliver’s many marked-up books, I understood that the art of annotation is, almost by definition, impulsive—you have to get your thoughts down now, right now—even if it means turning the book upside down to complete a thought. There’s no time to find a pad of paper, no time to turn the page, no time to pull out a journal. (Over his lifetime, Oliver filled more than 600 handwritten journals and notebooks.)
Second, Emma Sarappo:
The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise.
…That’s the thing about books. If Barbara, or another character, is making me bang my head against the wall, I can just close the novel and move on with my life. But sometimes I like to salt my days with a person who simply grinds my gears. I might yell aloud to the empty hall; I might text everyone I know about a character’s foibles and idiocy (and tell them to read the book too). I’ve been known to, infrequently, throw my reading material across the room. Or I might just blacken more margins. Writing “I HATE THIS” inside a book can be another way of saying “I love you.”
There you have the whole pathology in miniature: the injury openly confessed, then immediately wrapped in the language of intimacy.
This is the classic logic of the abuser. Look what you made me do. “I only blackened your margins because I care so much. If you were less infuriating, less provocative, I would not have had to lose control and mark you up in purple felt pen.” Then the poor volume is shoved back onto the shelf, dust jacket pulled tight, and told to keep smiling for company. “No, no, everything’s fine. She just gets passionate about literature.” Meanwhile the endpapers look like a bathroom stall, and the title page bears the scars of “passion.”
We are asked to regard this not merely with tolerance, but with admiration. The annotator has become a romantic figure: impulsive, alive, too full of thought and feeling to restrain herself before the nearest clean surface. But this is only graffiti with better publicists. Spray-paint a train car and society still clings to certain outdated moral prejudices. Cover a novel with shrieking little exclamations and suddenly we are in the presence of intellectual vitality. No. A book is not your emotional support drywall. It is not there to absorb your all-caps eruptions. If “I love you” and “I hate this” have become interchangeable, that may explain a great deal about contemporary culture, but it does not contribute to the well-being of the book.
It is one of the many achievements of liberal modernity to have taught people that every appetite becomes noble the moment it is furnished with a vocabulary of self-expression. The old barbarian merely pillaged. The new barbarian announces that she is in dialogue. Her outrages arrive garnished with theory. What was once defacement is now “interaction;” what was once possessive ugliness is now “making the text one’s own.” I confess I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a book already is its own. I do not improve a cathedral by chalking objections on the pillars, nor honor a symphony by shouting commentary over the second movement. But the bibliomaniac of destruction — that is to say, the bibliomisiac — finds every finished object intolerable until it bears some trace of his own precious ego. He cannot read without leaving fingerprints on the texts.
Has your first edition been marked, dog-eared, or struck with handwritten outbursts? You are not alone. Every year, thousands of innocent books suffer in silence at the hands of “enthusiastic readers” who insist the abuse is really affection. At SafeShelf, we provide emergency rehoming for hardcovers in crisis, confidential repair services for damaged endpapers, and trauma-informed support for volumes with banalities scrawled in the margins. Because love should not leave visible scars.
Menders of the Faith
If storytelling has been so utterly transformed by these new technologies, why do the earliest forms of storytelling stick around? People are constantly saying, poetry is dead, novels are dead, but they aren’t dead. They don’t go away even though we keep getting new storytelling technologies. Why do you think that is?
The real deep answer is we’re exactly the same people with exactly the same brains and behaviors that we were 100,000 years ago or more when storytelling first evolved. The things that appeal to us about stories today are the things that appealed to our ancestors. That hasn’t changed. The hard-wiring is the same. And more people can read than ever before. More novels are being sold than ever before.
I’ve been talking about this a long time because I get really tired of this old post-literate world thing. Marshall McLuhan was declaring the world post-literate when only 40 percent of people could read. Give me a break. We live in a world right now where there’s been a democratization of reading, an egalitarianism of reading. People who like romance and fantasy books are writing their own romance and fantasy books and they’re self-publishing them. And some of them get the attention of traditional publishers and become very successful.
It’s only anecdotal, but I’ve seen four or five people reading actual books while doing their cardio at the gym. I declare this to be a new trend. Books are back!
The hopeful fact is that human nature is older than its gadgets. The devices change, the incentives change, the social atmosphere changes, but the basic desires remain: for story, for meaning, for company, for some account of how to live. Poetry and novels don’t vanish when a new machine arrives to distract us. The quick pleasures may proliferate like kudzu, but they don’t strangle the deeper inclinations; they only compete with them, and often remind us of them by contrast. What goes stale fastest is usually not seriousness but novelty.
The sane response to such change is neither panic nor worship, but adaptation. The useful question is the old Stoic one: what is in my control here? I can’t restore an earlier dispensation, nor can I prevent the age from becoming what it is becoming. I can, however, decide what kind of attention I will cultivate, what companions I will keep, what habits I will strengthen, what small corner of life I will tend against the surrounding haste. To live bookishly now is not to pretend the smartphone age never arrived; it is to preserve, within its conditions, the values that matter most.
So have faith. The bookish life will never again be the center of gravity for the whole culture, and probably it never really was. But there will always be those in whom the superficial pleasures have begun to sour, who find themselves hungry for something steadier, more inward, more durable. For them, the best argument will not be a stemwinder against modernity, but the gravitas of those steeped in the older ways. Be seen keeping faith with books. The example is the invitation.
I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, Somewhere You Can Hear My Voice
To capture readers, one must write novels. To lose them, one must write well.
On this: “More and more, I have had to convince myself that a writer’s importance is proportional to his ability to disregard the reader, to possess an unshakeable confidence—since nothing exists without the social context—that he will nonetheless have a reader and a wonderful one at that.”
— Ludwig Hohl, The Notes: or On Non-premature Reconciliation
Shortly after reading this, I was amused to read Patrick Kurp mention being mildly scolded by a reader for referring in passing to Spinoza, thereby forcing this wounded party to consult Wikipedia, as if he had been sentenced to hard labor in the salt mines. One tries to be sympathetic. Life is busy. Time is short. Fingers grow weary. And yet I have always supposed that readers of a certain sort could be trusted to survive the strain of encountering an unfamiliar name without demanding that the writer provide hyperlinks. Thankfully, I have never been rebuked for my own obscure references or inside jokes, though I confess I have proceeded on the sanguine assumption that you fine folks are fully capable of using the search functions on your fancy internetting machines.
I was surprised to recognize myself in Hohl’s aphorism. I am not by nature a swaggering or headstrong person. In most areas of life I can second-guess, hesitate, revise, and doubt myself into a standstill. But for whatever reason, the uncertainty stops at the edge of the page. There, and perhaps only there, I have always felt an almost unreasonable assurance: that I know what I am doing, that I can do it well, and that there are people who will appreciate it. It is not a moral virtue, and certainly not an achievement of character. It feels more like an unearned gift or a quirk of temperament; a peculiar form of self-command bestowed in one narrow province and withheld everywhere else.
I have no illusions of my importance, but truth is, I have never considered the reader’s interest. I take it for granted and write to my own self-imposed standard for anyone who cares to read along. This is not contempt for the reader. It is a form of respect. In any event, I have no desire to “capture” readers. It’s enough to occasionally see them as glowing eyes in the darkness, reflecting the campfire, or to find their tracks in the site stats.