WHY NOT A KINDLE™?

John Cheever, 1912-82

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As regular readers know, I've been trying of late to figure out my relationship with digital technologies.

There's actually nothing very new about that. I got my first Mac in 1984, the year Apple introduced it and have tracked the changes in my own attitudes and behavior ever since, Mac after Mac. From thinking of the computer as a word processing tool, to thinking of it as the platform on which I conduct my life.

That admission scares me a little. I don't want to cede so much control to something I can't control, and yet . . .  Well, you know. I can't help myself. Everybody's doin' it.

SLIGHTLY SMUDGED ROMANCE

John Cheever taught me to prefer short stories to novels.

I'm not sure why I discovered this preference through reading Cheever rather than, say, Bernard Malamud or Grace Paley, whose backgrounds are, like mine, working class and Jewish. Perhaps it's that in Malamud and Paley I found a truth I recognized, whereas in Cheever's work I found a truth more compelling for the foreignness of its sensibility, people and references.

So when I read the mostly favorable reviews of Blake Bailey's new biography, Cheever: A Life, the decision to buy the book was immediate. With Cheever's reputation not quite as lustrous as it was a decade or two ago, forgoing the book seemed almost like an act of disloyalty.

But when I opened my copy and the dust jacket detached from the book and fluttered to the floor, it all came back--the fumbling inefficiencies and slightly smudged romance of putting words, as we used to say, into type; of bookends and bookmarks and blue pencils . . . hot type and cold . . . rag content and 12-page signatures stitched together . . . rubber cement and library paste, press runs and press proofs and galley-proofs. Shelves collapsing under the weight of all those words. 

Versus the lightness and utility of digits.

QUESTIONS FROM A HABITUAL BOOK BUYER,
ADDRESSED TO HIMSELF

All it took was one fluttering dustjacket to make the perfectly conventional act of buying a book seem a little thoughtless.

--All that paper. All those trees. Why not a Kindle?

--Not only that, but since I already read more online than on paper, why am I continuing to buy books, especially new ones?

--Why pay the price of a new hardcover, which seems like signing up for a battle already lost. It'll be on the remainder tables at Costco three months from now.

--And even if I never buy another book––not likely––what about the ones already lining the shelves behind me here in my office-cum-library? Will I ever read them a second time? Will I ever tackle those I've never even opened?

Meanwhile, between the covers of this new book on Cheever, 679 pages of printed text await. I have to admit the prospect excites me. Would it be the same on a Kindle, or something like it? Probably.

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JOHN CHEEVER: A Life, by Blake Bailey (Knopf, 2009; hardcover, 770pp.)

Comments

[Ellen Bate]

I don't even know a TypeKey from a TypePad! Too electronic for me.
I have spent a rather significant period of my life being called a Ludite by my son. I didn't own a color TV for years, I avoided electrical appliances in favor of any other kind and felt my fight to minimize my relations with all utility and gasoline companies was a leftist imperative. I toasted bread in the gas stove for years.
Now, a long suffering, regularly paid, civil servant, I regale my free time with a color TV and a CD player (which I don't use much) and a MacBook Pro. But, I guess, unrepentant Ludite that I am, I feel the luxury of reading a BOOK, or a newspaper(not a blog, (forgive me,) or other kinds of transmissions via electronic medium) is, not only my birthright, but a thoughtful process that is not replicated by electronic media. Knowing you as long as I do, I understand your remorse for murdered trees. But, they are replaced when paper is manufactured, you know? They can be sustainable. As an artist, I happen to love and revere paper.

I spent the day, yesterday, at the Botanic gardens, with an old friend from my days in the Boston area. Of all the people I know, I think Walter's carbon footprint is probably the smallest. He has been riding his bicycle from Washington Heights, to Brooklyn, to see his dentist, for years. He met me at MOMA, one afternoon, this winter, when it was snowing. He rode down on his "ugly" city riding bike, so it wouldn't get ripped off from being parked on the street while we went to the museum to see a film. He doesn't own a TV or a computer. He is a retired teacher and he is over seventy. He is a playwright. He writes on paper.

Think of all the electricity that is used to run our computers. And the pollution from the batteries. Are books and papers in print REALLY the enemy? you frighten me a little, Dan. Think of it this way, paper is far more recyclable than is the source of all this electricity and amperage.
I do think electronics are easier for most. And I do appreciate intelligent blogs like yours that provoke my grey cells, but there is nothing like a book! (on paper). By the way, I like to read a paperback or do my crosswords on paper, in the subway. I do see more and more people with these tiny computerized things, playing games and, maybe, even, reading. But somehow, the portability of a good paperback seems more immediate. Most of my acquaintances who are computerphiles are not that literate, by the way. They are more enamored of the processes and immediacy of the computer than of it's cultural possibilities. I think it's sort of like NPR or NET educational media, culture and computers are not really, necessarily supportive of one another. In fact, I think the popularity and growth of computers may be, like all other commercial and industrial capitalist ventures, directed to the lowest common denominator.
Please don't let them stop publishing books and newspapers! I beg you!

By the way, I do love your illustrations.

[Dan Icolari]

Since you send out a fair number of communications yourself, Beth, you will understand how much I appreciate it when the message in the bottle, released into cyberspace, produces an intelligent response. (I loved Leonard and Virginia, "bending over their terminals.")

A clarification on 'platform': I used the term quite consciously because, when I thought about it, it seemed to me I was returning to the computer again and again for matters routine and creative, business-related and highly personal, mundane and (sorta) ecstatic. The central locus/clearinghouse/reference-object connected to more and more of what I do. It all (or mostly, seemingly 'all') starts here.

I don't trust digits as I don't trust the abstraction called the market. I still construct a paper mirror-image, housed in a file cabinet, for all kinds of documentation (referring to 'documentation' housed 'in' a computer has the same ambivalent ring as 'horseless carriage').

Inside my brain there lodges a bad painting of a fevered Yeshiva student poring over Talmud and Torah by candlelight in a freezing cold attic room in Sofia, Bulgaria, 1937. I know the danger you're referring to, and I'm definitely susceptible. Thanks for the light, slightly admonishing tap of your fan.

[Beth]

Ah, the flutter of the dust jacket. Even when reading quietly at home, I remove it. To preserve it. Then, when the book is read, return the jacket to embrace the volume. Set on bookshelf, until next reading.

But you're right; why kill all those trees, for what? Nostalgia? Publishers are dying out; profit margins are thin. "Power buyers" like B&N, Borders, etc, exert a control over publishers' choices, not unlike censorship.

So if more books could be published electronically, wouldn't that benefit writers, readers, publishers? And printing can now be done on demand. Talk about your small press. (Imagine Virginia and Leonard at Hogarth, bending over their terminals.)

Maybe losing that lovely "new book smell" and the sound of the book jacket is not too great a price to pay for broader and more robust publication opportunities.

We must continue to think about this, talk about this.

But re your Mac comment: a platform from which to conduct your life? Surely you jest.
(Platform, sure. But life? Let's all just live it.)