The Stale, Continued

First of all, if you’re interested in this great little book by Gabriel Zaid that tackles publishing, reading, and writing in the 21st century, you may want to read the first part of my response here.

“And just a few thousand copies, read by the right people, are enough to change the course of conversation, the boundaries of literature, and our intellectual life. What sense is there, then, in lunching books into infinity so that they are lost in the chaos?” (pg. 49)

Though it often reaches sentimental altitudes when a book-buyer stumbles into a shop and finds something rare, dignified, and gleaming through all of its rarity, the great implications of large printings is that they are potentially in many places for many uses; while certain texts, such as a new James Paterson novel or Eat This Not That pocket-book, are not at face value worth much of anything historically-speaking, even these texts represent our culture at the very moment, at this very statis in time.

To fill future shelves in Albania, Nigeria, and Haiti with books of these, which have value in their historo-cultural content, as well as perhaps intro-to-English dialectics, there may in fact be an imperialistic attitude reached with trying to send books to other countries. It’s like an invasion, to some degree; I remember working at my college book store and at the end of the semester, during the “buy-back period,” any books that were not resold to the book store would be thrown into the “send to Africa” bins located conveniently outside the book store’s exit. I can’t imagine Plato’s Cave or advanced Chemistry having much relevance in Somalia or Ethiopia, but I still argue that the presence of them is better than the presence of zero books at all. Having some sort of material to give away (though the material would probably be sold to these countries through our intricate, ever-arching web of consumerist non-profit and humanitarian organizations at some level) might help somebody. The chances might rise with every book you’ve got flying over there.

And at the same time, regardless of the language and the country the book comes from, its presence somewhere on this earth is tangible; it will likely exist, pages white or darkly yellowed or molding to mush, continuously. If human beings wipe their digital megaverses out (through cyber terrorism or technological evolution or what-have-you), the many pages in the many books will last in lockers, walls, chests, coffins, time-capsules, monuments, bunkers, and on and on and on. Our dependency on the intangible, the digital to be specific about it, is worrying; the presence of the physical object is balancing.

Of course the book-burning groups, which I recently fantasized about and which equally stem from the Nazis, Ray Bradbury and Wall-E, will probably come along after they realize how much paper trash really is out there, and will make it their primary goal to rid us of our archivable literature. You can already see such disposals through recycling bins, and even way before our “green age” began, at the local dumps. Ever been to a trash center? The piles of magazines are outstanding. One time in grade school we had to visit a local trash crematorium of sorts. I went off on my own and found the paper disposal building, on the floor of which were many a porn magazine. As you can imagine, a youth of the countryside like myself was enamored, enraptured even, by all the smut on the ground. I even wanted to steal the shit and take it back with me to drool over during the endless yellow busride back to school. Thankfully, fortunately, I never got that chance.

“[T]he true role of books, which is to continue our conversation by other means.” (pg. 49)

If the role of books is to continue conversation, then it means that conversation can be continued outside of the verbal communication environment; is another way of expressing language(s). But is it necessary? Here’s a brief, premature rundown of what books do: create ownership (ownership of art, ownership of material goods, collectors, et cetera), create hubris and pride (again, view the owner(s) of the creation), influence society on a cultural level both positively and negatively (especially via marketing tactics), cause isolation (and yes it’s good for an escape once in a while from the throws and exhaustion of living in a good or bad society, but what is that saying about the society if we want to escape it?), provide information to those that might not be able to get it via a real, living person or conversational voice, allow referencing (our memories are like balloons and do have limits), allow for studying (see previous isolation note), and are generally a displacement of information (instead of just telling you what I want to say, I’m going to write it down first, and maybe be more elegant, poetic, and refined, but you’ll have to wait a second or minute or hour or day because the book has to be printed and shipped and so on and so on . . .)–but there’s more!

Books are wonderful items in that they allow for the mass presentation of ideas (of the author and editor, yes, but also extending to the ideas of many others) through a conversation that cannot possibly take place between the voice in the book and the entire globe. Though oral histories could still, perhaps, be continued today even with our zany technologies, the written language allows you to take something valuable (contraceptive pamphlets) or influential (the Bible) and distribute it to an audience that normally wouldn’t be had. They are amazingly spreadable, and amazingly efficient. “Oh, I read this great book the other day about this guy who died on a cross in the name of forgiveness and I want you to read it, but I see I have to go to work way over here right now and you over there right now, and it’d just be easier for me to give you the damn thing!” Books are also great ways for developing ideas because they all for a concentrated form of interpretation; something you may or may not have gotten to the same degree through verbal communication, that standard Socratic conversation.

But do we need books to continue on? Evolution and revolution would probably be much slower, yes, but all the shit we get bombarded with, the tabloids and the faux-news, the advertising and the slush-culture, all of which probably numbs us down more than anything else, would not be as concentrated if the only medium of idea-exchange was through verbal communication. I can just imagine a busy Egyptian or Indian street, books not available to anyone, where everyone is yelling and trying to get a conversation going, for better or for worse, to buy, to sell, to trade, to exchange, nobody in their homes reading, everyone jabbering away. Maybe life would be too overwhelming without books; especially with a population like that of todays.

I’d definitely want to pull an Edward Abbey and head for the hills; or am I thinking of the Unibomber? Or am I thinking of Emily Dickenson? Or am I thinking of or last president? Or am I thinking of all the Mainers up there right now sucking in the sweet pine air, canoeing and paddling . . . but then again, it’s reaching a point where the huddled masses have relieved themselves of nearly all verbal communication with text messaging, cell phone emails, and of course our personal computer station hubs where we can live out our non-verbal existence surfing the net, writing blog posts, or living in virtual gaming realities; soon we won’t have to talk to each other at all, verbally. Remember those headsets that came out for some of those games on the PS2 and X-Box? Did those even take off after a year or so of being in existence? I wouldn’t have anything to say to the guy I just fragged with a grenade launcher for the 5000th time either.

“Culture isn’t a product, of course. But what then are oranges, orchids, birds, sunsets? Anything can begin as revelation and become currency, an object, a commodity. To avoid this, a process of certification is invented, as ambiguous as the object itself. The word becomes a notarized contract; the academic title provides a guarantee; the insitution legitimizes; the stamp of cognoscenti certifies.” (pg. 53)

There are numerous issues with this statement, many to which are obvious and widely debatable–I mean come on, culture isn’t a product? Are we sure? What about Disney World culture? What part of that isn’t merely the selling of souls in order to please some cash-holder? And aren’t we under one huge gridded umbrella of control and systematic sales, anyway? African music: Putamayo; Alabama quilts: art museum posters; poetry books: college Creative Writing markets (which is chronologically linear, ascending steeply). Hip hop is arguably one of the biggest sold cultures, or pieces of culture, in America (and in other countries today); in America hip hop not only has an audience through the African American communities (and most of the emcees marketed come directly from these communities because they know, they “know,” these communities, and how better to push a product than by having someone who bought and ate up the product in the first place teaching you about the market?), but also has an audience through the middle and upper classes–it’s very cool and emotionally, socially rewarding for hip white kid A (like myself, for instance) to enjoy hip hop, even though hip hops largest roots didn’t come from my own background.

I remember loving Busta Rhymes, Notorious BIG, and Jermaine Dupree in 5th grade; I went on to like the Beastie Boys and Eminem and Limp Bizkit, those rappers/rap groups I could racially identify myself with (being from Maine, race was always a big thing, though a subconscious and repressed thing) in high school, and then continued the white rapper obsession with artists like Sage Francis in early college. Fascinatingly, I really got into Lil Wayne due to the music site Pitchfork in Junior and Senior year of college, and since then have been blending my fascination for white hip hop emcees (including Aesop Rock and Atmosphere) with old school, gangsta, crunk, Lil Wayne, and other shitty contemporary hip hop.

Lately I’ve been on a deejay kick with Peanut Butter Wolf and Charizma, and have gotten into some of the whackiest, though prolific, emcees like MF Doom and Q-Tip, but I still think it’s funny when I listen to Clipse and pretend like Atlanta coke dealing is any way relevant to me, or that there is something beyond the absurd that I’m gaining from listening to it. Though the beats are pretty cool. Also of importance is the new “white kids hip hop” that is cropping up in response to the interest gentrifiers and boojie hip kids with their interest in a predominantly black genre: artists like Cool Kids are coming around and providing hip hop directed particularly toward this audience; it’s no longer about the streets, but about growing up playing video games, going to house parties, and one-two-buckle-my-shoe. Is this really a bad thing? It’s certainly the way of the biz, so to speak, and its pretty obvious; but there are tons of undergrond circles I’m not even touching. The poetry of the emcees that you will never hear is still going on out there, regardless of entire cultures, subcultures, and art forms being sold off like hotcakes. People are spouting their rhymes, just like they are writing their books, and providing them (not even with monetary charge, sometimes, like in the case of e-books like the one I just released, Toward Pandemic!) for smaller circles, narrowed audiences.

Going back to the quote, I instantly tried to think of things in the world that aren’t looked at as objects, as commodities, today. I instantly thought of the article with CA Conrad and Brenda Iijima: the Interlude on Poetics as Dirt, and I thought about dirt. While land, this semi-tangible, semi-corporeal concept we humans, Americans in particular, zoom onto through our wonderful capitalist system, is all about dirt, it’s not really about dirt. Unless you’re a geologist or gardener, you probably won’t walk down the street, especially in an urban environment, and say: look at all this prosperous DIRT I have on my hands. Yet we could, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Maybe it will eventually be used in terms of fuel or maybe we will start selling handfuls of earth for bottlecaps. There are strange things in this world like dirt, and perhaps rain, that many of us probably wouldn’t hold as objects. I mean, going after the thing itself, we could easily classify all of this as object this and object that, but it’s not the same in the sense that you might ever want it to be an object. For lack of a bigger vocabulary, things like dirt, rain, and . . . you can see I’m struggling with additional examples here . . . even dustballs are resources but they remain neglected resources. The source of the neglect is that we are distracted; however, once we have (if we do) completely wrecked our state of affairs/existences and have nothing left, we may turn to these resources and certify them, legitimize them, but until that time, they remain passive.

But here’s a curious thought: for such a passive thing that we deal with regularly, weather has a presence in our daily life (usually a hatred or bland regard) that takes up space in conversation more than anything else; and yet, we never go beyond the step of liking or hating weather. Another standardization of our daily life to keep us from getting a little too worked up, a little too out of the daily grind? I can just imagine another world, very similar to ours, only sans weather channel, where shamanic businessmen do rain dances in the morning before getting their grande lattes and jumping on the el for a quick trip to the office, in a world where water is scarce and begged for. I can just imagine people doing lightning dances, when all the lightning comes all the time and people are shitting their minds apart hoping they are one of thousands getting zapped on that particular day. I can just imagine people doing earth dances, eating dirt, crafting dirt, art-ifying dirt, because all the book burners came and burned their books, and all their virtual reality servers crashed, and all the bottlecaps were spent, and then all we would have would be the dust and the dustballs, that last part of our bodies floating around in the corners of the room. I think people would love and hate and acknowledge and interact with each and every thing in this world before they went after the gray dirt/skin particles hiding out in the corners of the rooms. Yeah, sweep away, dust away; the object as anti-object. Maybe poets turn into dustballs after they die.

Part three of this article series will be written soon, but until then, buy the book, and for goodness sake, pay attention!