Responding to: So Many Books (pt. 1)

Recently I was given a copy of So Many Books (2003) by Gabriel Zaid thanks to Paul Dry (of Paul Dry Publishing in Philadelphia). This book is a collection of essays which delves into the world of reading, writing, publishing the self, and publishing others in the 21st century. While the book is a short 143 pages, but is jam-packed with insightful information that is presented in a matter-of-fact way. It covers everything from consumerism, marketing, writing poetry, cultural conversation, the accumulation of material, and there is even a model that Zaid puts forth at the end of the book, metaphoric, beautiful, and somewhat strange, which holds its ground through several essays.

And while it is accessible enough to hold an audience across the literate board, the information provided comes off as profound and necessary, new and bold. I took the liberty of marking certain passages that have been the most insightful, and providing responses to these passages that extend the conversation.

“Today intelligent conversation and contemplative leisure cost infinitely more than the accumulation of cultural treasures. We now have more books than we can possibly read. The knowledge accumulated in our pint culture infinitely surpasses the learning of Socrates. In a survey of reading habits today, Socrates would score low. His scant scholarship and his lack of academic titles, foreign languages, resume, and published work would prevent him from competing for important posts in the cultural bureaucracy, which would confirm his criticism of the written word: The simulation and credentials of learning have come to carry more weight than learning itself.” (pgs. 37-38)

Usually when historic implications are made, I tend to frown. But in this case, Zaid presents a valid point that students in high schools and colleges should pay attention to. If you’re studying this ancient philosopher who criticized literature and emphasized conversation, what relevant impact will it even have on a day and age where conversation has even surpassed what we knew about it yesterday?

In several years there may be a lull in the way technology affects our daily routines–there is only so much a person can take from technology (though jobs require us to push forward–check that Blackberry one more time, please!) before they need to escape. Just look at our inhibitions to smash our cell phones when drunk, or drop them in the toilet accidentally, or lose them. We aren’t that attached if we can let these slip-ups occur.

But Zaid wrote this 2003 publication probably around 2000, maybe 2001 at the latest, and I feel like the new conversation was just starting to infiltrate the front lines of culture then. E-books certainly weren’t huge yet, and they still aren’t huge in a dominating way, even today (just as Zaid says in another essay about his own time). But ultimately what it comes down to is the accumulation of stuff, and with the digital, the accumulation is endless. You can’t possibly fathom how much stuff is possible to obtain with our current external data storages. It’s absurd; and yet, there’s a fine line between accumulation and accumulating to advance yourself. The former is very easy, the latter almost impossible.

I download something like 30 albums a week because I can, because the way I download them makes them free, but ultimately having them on a hard drive that might simply get run over by a truck in the near future (a reset button of sorts) is a very big waste of time for me; but I’m hooked into the system. Same with books, though now to a lesser extent. For the current age, it’s all about knowing all of the journals, particularly online. I favorite a new journal every day. Logically it will be impossible for me to A) find a poetic voice with such influence going on; and B) if I never read the journals, it will be impossible for me to ever understand which journals I should submit to without doing several years of worth of reading this year’s journal releases.

“Culture, in the anthropological sense of “way of life,” manifests and reproduces itself live, but it is also a collection of works, tools, codes, and repertoires that may or may not be inert text. The same is true of culture in the limited sense of “cultural activities.” In both senses, what is important about culture is how alive it is, not how many tons of dead prose it can claim.” (pgs. 40-41)

But now, with digital archiving, there is no real review system. We all say that culture is alive and well but we do not even know what the culture is; we are not even able to know whether the presence of culture means its alive or dead. So is it better to have a lot of information sitting there, getting ready to wade through it on our own terms, when we feel like it? Or is this risking an inevitable WALL-E scenario, where we won’t even be able to take care of our own cultural waste, where we will have to create something to filter through it ourselves.

The quick answer is: we’ve already created it (Google, and other search engines–we consider them very objective yet do we even know how it really works?) but the long answer is: will we even be able to fix it by the time we realize that massive amounts of information is, in fact, a problem? I remember one time playing a game on a computer back in high school and my computer was pretty old but I really wanted to play this game–a first person shooter, the next thing, so bad–and so I ran it and prayed that it would run smoothly even though I should have said: just wait–go find a job and get a better computer, then you’ll be able to have fun. But I loaded it up and lo! The thing ran so slow, and it was so hard to even shut down the application. Actually, fittingly, this was not the only time I had to shut the application down; usually I resorted to restarting the computer because the system’s memory took so long to process even a simple “quit” command.

Each year it seems like it takes more and more new things to show that humanity, or at least American humanity, is still a culturally vibrant thing. When are we going to become a more nostalgic culture that relays the past into the present? When are we going to sit around and read old books, ride old bikes, use old machinery? With all the people in the world, new discoveries can probably be made with old technology and culture. Culture does not always have to be hyper, spastic, and schizophrenic.

“Boredom is the negation of culture. Culture is conversation, liveliness, inspiration. In championing books that matter to us, we can’t restrict ourselves to increasing sales, printings, number of titles, news, cultural events, jobs, costs, and all other measurable quantities. the important thing is creative vitality, which we can sense if not measure; it lets us know when we’re headed in the right direction, although there are no set rules for encouraging it.” (pg. 41)

I think set rules can be found in the patterns in which we influence one another. Reading material for an intelligent, and usually educated or educatable individual is often dictated by the rules of the cultural guides: you’ve got Mephistophelian characters on every door step.

The media (magazines, newspapers, and even journals) often provide easily-accessible reviews–to every audience, mind you, which makes it a staple–that encourages or dissuades individuals to and from certain literature, or other creative interest. This results in a “creative vitality” that is often inspiring. When I pick up Esquire, I usually know that the books they are talking about are those that I know little about, and I feel, or maybe I used to feel (before I started addressing this metaphysical concern) that to be in the know, to be in the conversation of culture, would be to listen to this great voice of reason hanging out one step ahead of me.

The academy works in a similar way. We find certain scholars, classes, professors, and groups throughout campuses around the country and world that offer communities. These containments offer social answers, solutions and rhymes/reasons to why we should carry out our existence. Marxist groups pop up. Your mentors hand you a book and say: this will change your life because it changed mine. Knowing how the academic environment exists is the easiest way to understand how the entire world exists. Mentors are everywhere; book clubs are everywhere; parents buy their children certain books that influenced them, or agree to buy literature that will probably influence them (or video games or candy or toys . . . endlessness).

The mentors come in all shapes and sizes, but there is a level of pride that keeps the trend going, and ultimately results in the rules to which we are more bound than able to follow. If you deny what everyone tries to put upon you, you may still find creative vitality, but you will ultimately be an outsider; if you find a completely new thing and share it, then you will be following in the footsteps of many (I have been one to do this personally with discovered music, especially in late high school and early college) and it will feel good. To give a gift or open a door and get thanked or appreciated for it is both vain but relieving. We love to be loved; and we love our tastes to be acknowledged and loved as well. But if you have these great influences and they really are marvelous and you choose not to share them with anyone, then what is the point to life? It is like stealing a secret from yourself, like Golem taking the One Ring, and living out your entire existence until you are a wrinkled, miserable old being. Our current society does not like that.

“A two-year-old child is at the dinner table with her parents; they are talking to guests in a language that she has never heard before. All of a sudden, she starts to babble, as if she were speaking that language. She wants to participate in the conversation and is confident that she can. In a way, this child is repeating the adventure of learning to talk. And if she lived in the country of the friends who are visiting, she would surely master their language, the same way people learn to swim: by diving right in. Observing this urge to communicate, Paul Goodman believed that children could learn to read spontaneously; that the problem was school, which made them lose the desire. With a grade-school teacher’s Socratic irony, he said that if children went to school from the day they were born in order to be taught how to speak, a good percentage of the population would be unable to do so, or would stutter.” (page 42)

We often dive right into cultural languages and most often than not do not look into the implications of the language learning. Most often than not there are certain languages–spoken word, body language, written language, or other forms of communication (new media, et cetera)–that go undiscovered for our entire lifetime. I discovered there was something wrong with my progression in understanding foreign languages (I took Latin for two years but was never good at it) a long time ago, but it really took off in the middle of college. I got very depressed for not knowing foreign languages like essentially all of my friends, but never did anything to change my state of existence. Instead I would use the computer language I had learned through high school (no, not coding, though I did learn a little HTML), but rather, the cultural and habitual language of computer use, and I continued to maintain it, grasp it.

But it was like a slave-owner and a slave–I never went any further to enhance my skill set even though it was right there in front of me, well-oiled, disciplined. Today I have the desire and materials to learn German, and I have a couple dictionaries so I could learn Hungarian if I wanted, but I keep coming back to the Internet language, and keep trusting in it. Maybe this summer I will know how to break free, but where is the motivation? The incentive? Most of the college jealousy is gone, and my most immediate despairs involve finding a house to live in for the summer. But that house might turn into the crib that is needed.

The problem is that we dive right in, and often even when we do dive right in, all other efforts are like the stutters mentioned in the quote. Because we go towards what is most appealing to learn. For me, it was the Internet. And then everything else that isn’t as practical–both in learning in a school and on one’s own–becomes a chore that is only stutterable. Hell, even my speech capacities have been at a minimum these days, and I am more self-conscious than I was in junior high, which is phenomenally horrid, but at least we can understand why. Though I love walking around Philadelphia and enjoying the sights and sounds, there’s really no need for me to leave this computer terminal, where the stutters are in the form of fingers hitting the wrong key, but ultimately no one can see these fingers anyway.