sssh! this is a working library.

Realignment

When I began this site, I was intentionally vague about my intentions, in large part because I wasn’t entirely sure of them myself. I knew I wanted to write about books, and I knew I wanted to explore what it meant to hold a personal discussion about books (which are always read in solitude) in the public space of the web. But I did not know – and did not want to know – where that discussion would take me.

So over the summer I took a meandering route, reading and writing more or less as things came to me, without much consideration for how (or if) it would all come together. And it shows. There’s a spontaneity and stream of consciousness to the writing that I find both appealing and frustrating. Appealing in that I’ve been free to toy with ideas and then discard them without justification; frustrating in that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, some of the parts are clearly superior to the whole.

I suppose this is, to some extent, the inevitable consequence of publishing frequently; the quality of the writing is bound to ebb and wane. But I do think it warrants some adjustment. For one, I’m clearly better at writing long than writing short, so I’m going to make an effort to do more of the former and less of the latter. If that means I post less frequently, so be it. Reading long can be difficult on the web (as my last post attests), but I’m not about to concede that it can’t be done.

In fact, I’m so convinced it can be done that I’ve redesigned the site to make it friendlier to readers. Each post will receive it’s own page – a room of its own, so to speak. The sidebar content has been tucked into the footer, which is now hidden away with a bit of javascript (click on the little “more” tab to retrieve it). I’ve also eliminated the related books sidebar, which never really came together as I thought it would. The result is, I hope, a site that invites and encourages reading – hopefully a welcoming oasis in a web otherwise awash with clutter.

An argument could be made that this goes too far – that I’ve sacrificed certain inalienable principles of web design (notably, orientation and ease of navigation) in favor of creating a space for reading. But since this is a personal site I feel free to experiment in ways I may not recommend for a client. And I think reading is an often and unfortunately neglected behavior in the context of web design. Bringing attention to a cause usually involves taking things to an extreme, and I’m happy to be out on a limb on this one.

The previous version of this site (now referred to as the First Edition) is now available at 1e.aworkinglibrary.com and will remain there indefinitely. I intend to archive all design iterations this way, such that one can follow the process through which the design has traveled. While some things have changed here, one fact remains constant: that the writing and design on this site are inescapably intertwined. For that, I offer no apology.

On not reading:

… what is interesting about a text – which is not the work itself but the qualities it shares with others – might be best perceived by a critic who closes his eyes in the presence of the work and thinks, instead, about what it may be. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (29)

There was a time when I read books in, shall we say, the romantic manner, which is to mean all the way through and usually in one sitting. I had, at one time, an enormous patience for spending hour upon hour with a single text; on rainy days, I sometimes still do. But more often than not, I read a dozen books or more at once, flitting from one to the other, looking for the connections, finding the spaces between them where I can inhabit safely. This is one way of “not reading” which Bayard rescues and promotes, in that it rejects the singular book in favor of the entire library. And, perhaps more importantly, it recognizes that to lose oneself in another’s work is to fail to make a work of your own: only by pushing books away does the writer find her voice.

At its root, this is a vision of reading couched in discontent. It is discontent – or, more completely, a sense that any given text is insufficient – that makes us close the book at hand and tilt our head back in thought. What resides on the page is often just a catalyst for further thinking (or writing). It’s what feeds the culture around books – for a book that is never talked about is like the tree that falls in the forest: it leaves behind no evidence that it ever made a sound.

On words

When language is undeniably beautiful, the beauty is evidence of the truth of the words.

There are many writers capable of composing phrases which, at first glance, seem beautiful. They are like plastic surgeons who excel at temporary beauty — that which lives and dies in the glimpse. A long, hard look destroys them both.

A writer who knows her words are beautiful will yet harbor doubts; accuse her of ugly writing and you will be met with silence. But direct the same accusation to a writer who knows the shallowness of his words and he will viciously protest. The depth of the protest is a measure of the truth of the claim.

More on process:

The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through, and, where possible – in the academic industry – to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. Adorno, Minima Moralia (80)

There’s a certain amount of alchemy to writing that ought not to be expunged. It’s tempting to try to sort it out (a temptation I am often prone to), but in the sorting you’ll inevitably lose the whole.

Excellent writing advice from Adorno:

A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it.

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it.

The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction. Adorno, Minima Moralia (85–86)

A reminder about the collaboration required to produce a beautiful book:

Within the best book competition, we need an award for good editing. And it would be interesting to test the thesis that good design is only possible with books of substance, their material intelligently sorted out. The only fetishistic books would then be books that are actually about fetishism. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (213)

I don’t need a test to prove this; a book design can be attractive regardless of the substance of the text, but it can’t be beautiful. A beautiful design occurs at the intersection of great design and great writing.

Typographic disorder inevitably follows from disorder in construction; and, equally, typography by itself (if it could be ‘by itself’) cannot be effective with bad copy. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (228)

I’m fond of metaphor. It’s probably the most common trick in my literary arsenal – especially when joined with a little hyperbole – and for that reason alone I know I have to keep a watchful eye over them when I write, lest they get too far away from my purpose that they obscure instead of clarifying.

So, in the first, rough draft of my previous post, when reaching for examples of things that are “archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to,” I wrote “tuberculosis and the catherine wheel.” Tuberculosis seems to make sense; it’s a word that invokes the diseases of yesteryear, before vaccines and clean hospitals; and it’s ugly, at odds with the antiseptic vision of medical care we hold today. But that catherine wheel: at first, it seems well enough; it’s an image of medieval barbarism, and a vicious one at that. It has the right balance of antiquity and masochism to sit alongside the reference to TB. It was sufficiently over the top to arouse, but not quite absurd enough to send the whole thing careening off the road. And yet something wasn’t right.

Is the catherine wheel a thing of the past? Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, phrases like “waterboarding” and “stress position” and “illegal rendition” have entered (or reentered) the lexicon. In this climate, who’s to say the catherine wheel won’t yet see a renaissance? And then it wouldn’t be a relic; and then the analogy doesn’t hold.

Which left me with just one example when the rhythm of the sentence required two. What belonged alongside tuberculosis as a relic of things past? I considered an extinct animal (the wooly mammoth, perhaps); but the phrase was intended to suggest things that we are happy to have behind us, things which we are glad to have moved on from. I don’t know about you, but I think the world would be a more interesting place if the wooly mammoth were still with us, immune to the spears we throw at it, unconcerned about our privileged place in the world, unaware of the gods on our side.

The gods on our side. There it is. If there’s anything certain about the American political establishment today, it’s that the worshipping of one god (and a particular one at that) is not on the decline. I deleted “catherine wheel” and typed in “polytheism” instead.

Against criticism

Part of the underlying tension in Diary of a Bad Year surrounds the purpose of criticism. The narrator has been commissioned to write a series of essays which will appear in a German publication called “Strong Opinions.” The essays range in topic from statehood to Al Qaida, Machiavelli to intelligent design, music, and the afterlife. Nearly all express dismay with the political or social caliber of the world as it is now, with little anticipation that things will change. “These are dark times,” he says.

But neither the woman he hires to type his essays – nor her boyfriend – sees the world as he does. The woman encourages him to write about lighter fare, to tell stories about the birds, for example. The boyfriend goes further, and suggests that the narrator’s commitment to protest is a façade:

You put yourself forward as the lone voice of conscience speaking up for human rights and so forth, but I ask myself, if he really believes in these human rights, why isn’t he out in the real world fighting for them? What is his track record? And the answer, according to my researches, is: His track record is not so hot. In fact his track record is virtually blank. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (197)

It’s not clear what the boyfriend is looking for in his research; but one could hazard a guess: a count of legislation passed, boycotts organized, fundraisers held? Perhaps a product endorsement or two? All things more substantial (more quantitative) than words on a page. The “real world” has no use for words; the “real world” measures everything in money.

Which is, of course, true; we don’t much value words – especially written words – anymore, if in fact we ever did. But it does not necessarily follow from that fact that words are themselves valueless. I suspect quite the opposite is true: we devalue words because they are a threat to our comfort, to our continued sense of well-being in dark times. We devalue words for the same reason that certain governments lock up activists in hidden jails: because unleashed they would wreck havoc on the systems they challenge. The only effective weapon against the word is to abort it before it can reach even one person’s ear.

And so the boyfriend, and many others like him, become convinced by the status quo that words are not the means to change. They become convinced that money and celebrity have more currency in the global market than words, that indeed words have no place in a modern world such as this. Words are archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to, like tuberculosis or polytheism.

It’s as if every potential writer carries a loaded gun, but has been convinced, through many and various methods, that the gun is not, in fact, loaded; that it’s a harmless toy, not worthy even of children, who play with much more sophisticated toys these days. And so every potential writer (every potential critic) tosses the gun aside and walks away, unaware of what they have relinquished.

There is, however, an upside: if at any point someone realizes their error – if at any point they remember the gun was loaded after all – they have only to lift their eyes to see the roads are littered with guns, every one loaded, every one longing to be raised and aimed, every one ready to fire.

On the ways in which a text can change as it passes through the reader:

What has begun to change since I moved into the orbit of Anya is not my opinions themselves so much as my opinion of my opinions. As I read through what mere hours before she translated from a record of my speaking voice into 14-point type, there are flickering moments when I can see these hard opinions of mine through her eyes – see how alien and antiquated they may seem to a thoroughly modern Millie, like the bones of some odd extinct creature, half bird, half reptile, on the point of turning into stone. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (137)

In a similar vein, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which blogging affects the writing process, given the instant (and democratic) feedback and, perhaps more importantly, the exposure it affords. I use the word “exposure” in two ways: first, in the sense that the web provides an immediate and accessible audience, something that can be difficult to achieve in print (not that it’s easier on the web, but it is more democratic); and, second, in that it pulls the curtain away from the writer’s desk, “exposing” a process that is usually kept behind closed doors and only referred to in abstract, romantic terms. More on this soon.