Writing and Style: The Long, Meandering Sentence

The other day I was watching Jeopardy! (I know, I know, I'm some sorta geezer and this disclosure no doubt damages my Cool Cred, but WTF).(<---a bit of ironic foreshadowing!)

Anyway, HERE's the board I was looking at. Look at the category, "Send Me A Text." From the context, I got the first three, but didn't get the $800 or the $1000 ones. (Did you? I have sent precisely three texts in my entire life, and zero in the past two years. Kids 12-15 send 193 text messages per week, with girls sending more than boys.)

Which sent me, later that evening, to online dictionaries of Text-Speak.

Quite the cornucopia of knowledge I'll probably never use, but still: interesting: HERE.

                                    William Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature, hear
                                    his acceptance speech HERE.

Robert Anton Wilson, when talking about his style, often pointed out Joyce and Pound as influences. When he mentioned Faulkner, it was usually in the context of Faulkner's long, hypnotic sentences, sentences that start out telling you about a idea or person or something in the environment, then meandered around corners, banking off of the qualities of light and what that made a character think of, and that time when the town was faced with a crisis, and how they handled it, people around Faulkner's  Yoknapatawpha having seen quite a bit in their time, or at least thinking they did. Wilson wanted his own long sentences to "swing" just so.

And I've long marveled at long sentences and what they can do to my consciousness. Those of you who enjoy the sentence of clauses upon clauses: do you feel like we're a dying breed?

McLuhan might've said - maybe he did write - that with the ubiquity of SMSs (short messaging systems), it might eventually place long, literary sentences into relief: because of loudmouths on talk radio and their short sentences, with shouting pundit-heads on TV "news," all of this in the context of here and now robotic short declarative "news" bites, sound-bites, texts, tweets, etc: we might suddenly notice the long sentence as the marvelous thing it represents.

What does it represent?

                                  Pico Iyer. I became hooked with Video Night In 
                                  Kathmandu, then read The Global Soul, then The 
                                  Lady and the Monk. See his books HERE.

One of the most literary and cosmopolitan writers we have, Pico Iyer - my favorite travel writer, ever - not long ago penned a short essay on why he writes long sentences. He does it as "a small protest" against "the bombardment of the moment."

Iyer's wonderful essay is HERE.

He says we have a surfeit of information, but "what we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in the larger light." All well and good, but what does the long, Faulkneresque sentence do?

For Pico Iyer, "The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet-points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas and nays." Now we're getting somewhere...

The extended sentence, swoop-swerving on the page, signifies the complexities of our minds in a world in which, as Pico says, for shouting heads on TV, "Qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity." It seems like some sort of weapon of defense, this expansive sentence.

He also asserts - and I agree - that the long sentence, when we hang with it intently, as it seemingly tries to throw us with its subclauses acting on prior clauses, abrupt shifts or languid turns...we are allowed access to the depth and mysteries of our own minds. Long sentences have invasive qualities. They seem a close cousin to the instrumental solo, especially in jazz. They demand a relatively brief period of zen-like attention, and maybe that's enough to accomplish their ability to change our state of consciousness to something more in-tuned? Aye, I will say something that Pico did not say: the long sentence is a brief escape into a micro but finite province of meaning: it's mind-altering, it's like having passionate sex on your coffee break. Instead of coffee. It's like getting stoned. Sorta.

The long sentence militates against everything fast and easy and short in our world; it wants to save us from what we're in peril of losing: the subtle self-questioning of the live mind. The long sentence is a chance for passionate engagement with the world, and integrity's "greatest adornment."

Pico cites Rushdie and DeLillo, Proust and Pamuk, Philip Roth and Sir Thomas Browne, Annie Dillard and Alan Hollinghurst. And someone I've been reading lately, Thomas Pynchon:

"I cherish Thomas Pynchon's prose (in Mason & Dixon, say), not just because it's beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate."

I'm re-reading Pynchon's Inherent Vice right now. It's a novel filled with Los Angeles detective tropes, paranoia, drugs, music, crazy characters, and humor. The book is set in LA, very early 1970. And on page 13 Pynchon delivers a long sentence, a genius of image-projection upon the reader's mind (what Ezra Pound called phanopoeia), which, well, just read for yourself. The private detective in the novel - named "Doc" -  has an office next to a Dr. Buddy Tubeside, whose practice consists almost entirely of giving people shots of "Vitamin B12," which was a euphemism for methamphetamine. (B12 is a real vitamin - it prevents anemia - but it always helps to have a euphemism for a populace paranoid of the Drug User.) This is a historical fact: doctors in the 1950s through about the mid-1970s, would see middle-class patients - often housewives - who felt uninspired in their dreary housework, they had little nagging pains, they felt "blah." Doctors could give a shot and do the trick every time! How meth has changed over the years, eh?

Anyway, here's Pynchon:

"Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of 'B12' -deficient customers which already stretched back to the parking lot, beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just in off some high-stress red-eye, even a few legit cases of pernicious anemia or vegetarian pregnancy, all shuffling along half-asleep, chain-smoking, talking to themselves, sliding one-by-one into the lobby of the little cinder-block building through a turnstile, next to which, holding a clipboard and checking them in, stood Petunia Leeway, a stunner in a starched cap and micro-length medical outfit, not so much an actual nurse uniform as a lascivious commentary on one, which Dr. Tubeside claimed to've bought a truckload of from Frederick's of Hollywood, in variety of fashion pastels, today's being aqua, at close to wholesale."

Do you not only get a picture here, but a snapshot of a historical moment, with ideas about how we negotiate drugs and permissibility, how we frame addiction, how things change, how sex can go with drugs, people will always just want to feel good, etc? I do. And "beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index" just kills me. O! To write a phrase like that! What about "stewardii"? And "lascivious commentary" on the nurse uniform.

It's Things like this that keep me reading, ladies and germs. It's sentences like that that give me a contact high.

                                    One of the only photos of the extremely enigmatic 
                                    Pynchon, born in 1937. When he's been labeled 
                                    "reclusive" he shoots back with something like 
                                    "You mean I'm not media-friendly?" 

Aldous Huxley, H.L. Mencken and My (Our?) Consumption of Trash

Recently my brilliant blogging colleague Eric Wagner answered a query I made about reading difficult books. At the end of his response he noted that both James Joyce and Ezra Pound lived through a period in which information doubled, and this may account, in part, for why both men wrote such crazy-difficult books, still avant in play with forms and a level of abstruseness. The idea of information doubling was taken from Robert Anton Wilson, who called the apparent logarithmic increase of information flow-through in a society the "Jumping Jesus Phenomenon."

                                   Aldous Huxley, my intellectual main squeeze until I 
                                   discovered Robert Anton Wilson. I still love Aldous.
                                   Aldous? I can't quit you, man!

When I read his response it reminded me of something Aldous Huxley wrote, in 1934. Aldous is still in his worried-angry-aristocratic-mandarin phase in the quote ahead, two years after publishing Brave New World, and vexed over humanity's prospects. A pacifist of astounding intellectual gifts, he navigated his way through two world wars almost clinically blind (yet publishing terrific art criticism!), writing an astonishing array of essays and novels of ideas, landing in Hollywood to avoid the bombing in Europe, and eventually becoming one of the most interesting mystics in history and an early experimenter in psychedelic drugs:

"Advances in technology have led...to vulgarity....Process reproduction and the rotary press have made possible the indefinite multiplication of writing and pictures. Universal education and relatively high wages have created an enormous public who know how to read and can afford to buy reading and pictorial matter. A great industry has been called into existence in order to supply these commodities. Now, artistic talent is a very rare phenomenon; whence it follows...that, at every epoch and in all countries, most art has been bad. But the proportion of trash in the total artistic output is greater now than at any other period. That it must be so is a matter of simple arithmetic. [I would call this part of Aldous's riff an analog to the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon. - OG] The population of Western Europe has a little more than doubled during the last century. But the amount of reading - and seeing - matter has increased, I should imagine, at least twenty and possibly fifty or even a hundred times. If there were n men of talent in a population of x millions, there will presumably be 2n men of talent among 2x millions. The situation may be summed up thus. For every page of print and pictures published a century ago, twenty or perhaps a hundred pages are published today. But for every man of talent then living, there are now only two men of talent. It may be of course that, thanks to universal education, many potential talents which in the past would have been stillborn are now enabled to realize themselves. Let us assume, then, that there are now three or even four men of talent to every one of earlier times. It still remains true to say that the consumption of reading - and seeing - matter has far outstripped the natural production of gifted writers and draughtsmen. It is the same with hearing-matter. Prosperity, the gramophone and the radio have created an audience of hearers who consume an amount of hearing-matter that has increased out of all proportion to the increase of population and the consequent natural increase in talented musicians. It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter." - from Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveler's Journal, sourced by Walter Benjamin for his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in his Illuminations.

Two things: Aldous is probably right: there's much, much more trash to be consumed, whatever "trash" is (I guess you know it when you see it?); and isn't it touching that Aldous cared so much about what that trash must be doing to us?

24 years later, in 1958, Theodore Sturgeon would formulate his (eventual) "law": 90% of everything is crap.

In this passage, Aldous reminds me of an Adorno or some other German Frankfurt Schooler who seeks to critique the "culture industry" and thereby save us from wallowing in mind-numbing Bad Art, which leads to fascism.

Who knows what Bad Art, or inferior radio/painting/writing does to us. I do think Aldous was being a tad snooty in 1934, but then I grew up watching Gilligan's Island...

I had previously blogged on Aldous way back HERE.

An interesting observation? In their days, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick were all writers not even considered as "important" by the official intellectuals; they were declasse; now they are at the top of the canon in their "genres": horror, detective fiction, and science fiction. As Marx quoted Shakespeare, all that is solid melts into air...and, I would add, often that which was "trash" turns to gold.

                               The Grand Vizier of Bad Taste, one of my faves, John Waters,
                               with his supporting players of geeks, hillbillies, rednecks,
                             sex perverts and dope addicts. Waters's books make me laugh out loud.

How do we know trash? Yes, you just know it when you see/hear it. But also: if we know well that which seems great and profound to us, perhaps the trash reveals itself by juxtaposition? Yes, but who's to say what is "great"? I say: your call. But keep expanding and exposing yourself.

I found this quote in a book by the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman:
"Edmund Wilson quotes H.L. Mencken as saying that he even enjoys the prospectuses put out by bond houses, because everything written is an attempt to express the aspirations of some human being. Burke's concepts of 'symbolic action' and 'rhetoric' result in a similar embracing of trash of every description..." The Burke here being Kenneth. (Hyman's book: p.386, The Armed Vision)

I receive catalogs in the mail, for a small press distributor, and often find myself reading these things, knowing I'll probably never buy any of the books, or maybe never read any of them either. (Although I will find little gems of ideas and author's names I'll follow up on...) I look at the layouts, the way the copy is written, maybe the unconscious aspects of the arrangements of things. I read catalogs for Dover publications, an entire 40-page extravaganza of books that I would never understand, like - I'm looking at one now - An Introduction to Orthogonal Polynomials, or Nash's and Sen's Topology and Geometry for Physicists. I end up daydreaming about the sort of person who really gets into this stuff. (Lately it's been a woman, but I digress...) How much different a mental life someone has who finds fascination in titles like Kernal Functions and Elliptic Differential Equations in Mathematical Physics, by Stefan Bergman and Menahem Schiffer! Do they apply this stuff right away? On what? And do they follow up by taking to bed with them Tensors, Differential Forms, and Variational Principles, by Rund and Lovelock? Not that any of this might constitute "trash," it's just that...because I buy books on history, mythology, poetry, linguistics and sociology from Dover, they send me their math catalogs too. And it may as well be "trash" to me, although on another level I know that these maths built the modern world. I cannot understand it. I do marvel that others do. They seem to marvel that I (seem to) understand Ulysses and The Wasteland, so there's some mutual respect radiating across the bow of the Two Cultures.

                                      Mencken, sage of Baltimore, also where John Waters
                                        is from.

I also read the health tips sent by insurance companies, the utility bills, a magazine called Beer Advocate my brother bought for me, which is about 80% ads. I'll pick up disparate magazines from the community-donated FREE rack at my local library, and just look a the worlds depicted and implied there. I do this in the sense of Mencken reading bond house prospectuses. I'll "read" Vogue and Highlights and Field and Stream. 

If Aldous was basically "right" in 1934, we all swim in trash, but like fish, we don't know it, for it pervades every space in our lives. It's as if we swim in and amongst the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, and we're almost totally oblivious.

Or Aldous's esthetics were too much hung over from someone like 19th century Matthew Arnold's - who happened to be related to Aldous on his mother's side.

Because I accept "trash" so willingly, and often enthusiastically (it used to be - 1967 to 1995 - that you were required to name drop Susan Sontag and her "Notes On Camp" right about now, but I refuse to), I think this brings both wonderful "trash" and extraordinarily luminous works of genius into a bold relief, and I will truncate yet another far-too-long spew by quoting from a fragment of Heraclitus:

"It is by disease that health is pleasant, by evil that good is pleasant, by hunger satiety, by weariness rest." (frag. #111, found p.77 of The Presocratics, ed. Wheelwright.)

                                Simon has written a gem here. He manages to link soap 
                                operas with classic literature, Seinfeld with British comedies 
                                of manners, etc. An underrated Lit Crit book, in my opinion.

Codex Jonesing: More Book Kulchur Schtuff

Can I Help You Find Something?

An unnamed staff writer at the Utne Reader wrote a very short piece for their November/December 2003  issue titled, "How To Find That Book You've Spent Years Looking For." The article itself isn't all that remarkable, but the comments are something you might like. More than eight years later, people are still chiming in, the last, as I write this, five days ago. I suspect the Utne attracts this kind of thing. 293 comments, in fits and starts, never dead, the comment thread that won't die...but might help you find a book or two you've always wanted? 

Bleu Mobley's Creation: Warren Lehrer

Blue Mobley just might be both the greatest and most fecund prison writer of all-time, and he's come up with a book that consists of 101 other books, and he's somehow managed to credibly assimilate typical genre styles, with backstories for his characters that are at times quite elaborate, with interconnections, and actually it seems Lehrer created Mobley, and...and...I have to check this guy out when he gets it published. Lehrer's Mobley and books within books. Lots of fake books make one really good one?

A Most Democratic Model For Your Book Club

The Omni Book Club, which started near Sandusky, Ohio and has spread to a few other <ahem> chapters around the country, is structured thus: instead of some "leader" deciding what book everyone will read and discuss, the Omni Book Club meets on a given day and everyone talks about the book(s) they have been reading, or just finished. People bring their books and talk about their experience reading them. Sometimes you might want to read aloud a passage or two to give the gist of why the book was so cool, or what was weird about it, whatever. Maybe the book disappointed you...but at least it was your decision to read the book. I really like this idea, and still plan to take a page from the Omni and get my own lot of Berkeley weirdos together to do this, probably with herbs, spices, beer and/or wine. I'm thinking the wrinkle in the standard book club model should open up some chances for personal performance of some sort: likely some of the other participants don't know your book or author, and you can really try to "sell" the book in your own way, but I guess I'll have to see.

The Book and Its Re-Purposing: An Idea That Seems Burgeoning

In one of my all-time favorite novels, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, there's a passage in which one of the main characters keeps his stash of pot in a hollowed-out copy of Sinclair Lewis's vision of fascist Unistat, It Can't Happen Here. Nice little joke. I've since found that objects that look like books but are really hinged containers and fit on your shelves (with title, and author, usually looking like a book from the early 20th century) are easily found. Here's a booze-flask camouflage book. Why anyone would need to hide their booze I don't know, but it's witty enough. "It's funny you mention the 21st Amendment. I just happen to have a book on that right here..." And you open it, your pal sees your booze, you have a good laff. Cory Doctorow at boingboing loves this sorta stuff. 

Repurposing books is an artform, and will probably proliferate, because there's just so many old sets of encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, and other books deemed as ephemera by someone; they're taking up too much space, gathering dust and we're just going to have to dump them at the Goodwill or public library, or...throw them away. Why not make them into furniture or Art? Here we see an example of old cookbooks made into a little shelf to hold...other cookbooks. 

Old books used to make a bathtub!

A 34-foot high sculpture of books about Abe Lincoln. There are 6800 or so volumes that have to do with Lincoln, and it's located in the theater where he was assassinated. I wonder if, eventually, there will be enough books on JFK and his assassination to remake New York's Kennedy Center, to exact size?

What? Too soon?

Cut to the chase: you have to see this one in action to believe it: a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption to turn your pages for you. It's totally insane and wonderfully inspired. It's not a repurposing of books, but a zany way to help you read them, possibly on par with making a bathtub out of old books. Not for the practically-minded!

The OG Learns A New Thing: Human Skin To Bind Books?
Sometimes I confess something comes along that makes me think I've led a relatively sheltered life.

Anthropodermic bibliopegy: using human skin to bind books. I saw this article, and, given the tone of the site, I thought, "Every now and then I bet these guys let in a hoax article, for kicks." (Note the person who commented on the article, "The original Face Book.") I assumed this was a hoax. Then I found out anthropodermic bibliopegy was apparently real, and went on up to the the end of Victoria, around 1900, when dissected corpses had their skin tanned. I read the above linked article and the Wiki and it seems not like a put-on to me, but I'm still letting the idea sink in, as to why this was thought to be a Good Idea. The story is just sitting there, in my stomach, undigested, and making me feel a bit nauseated...The idea of the record of a criminal being bound by that very criminal's skin? Ghastly. But apparently a Neat Idea up to the end of Queen Victoria's reign. You have to read this article and then try to believe it. I guess I sorta believe it, but I'm not happy about it.

If you happen to own an old leather-bound book from between 1700-1900, and it has a "bizarre waxy smell" and different "pore size" compared to cow or pig hide...Let's move on, shall we?

Book Porn
No, not porn-porn, but images of books, people reading, great writers at their desks, ya know: book porn. Check this Tumblr site dedicated to this form of porn, which caters to the bibliomane in, I'm guessing, most of us. (?)

Nathan Myhrvold's Molecular Gastronomy Book

                                           Here 'tis. 5 Vols, 40 pounds, 2400 pages.

Here''s Myhrvold making an omelette in a way you probably have not, on the morning Today Show, from around a year ago. I wonder about the people who buy this book and actually get really deep into the finer points of molecular gastronomy. I imagine they're either very fun to party with, or not at all fun. The video is about 4 minutes:

Nathan Myhrvold's IQ is presumably very, very high. You can buy his cookbook(s) for between $400-$500. It delivers "science-inspired techniques for preparing food." Lemme know how this works out for ya. Here's an interesting article on Myhrvold and his cookbook(s).

                               Old books at Basking Ridge Historical Society, New Jersey.
                               Photo by William Hoiles. Wikimedia Commons. I was not
                               able to determine if any of these were bound using human skin.


Sir Thomas Phillips (1792-1872): Greatest Bibliomaniac Ever?
The illegitimate son of an English textile manufacturer, Phillips inherited a sizable estate, and seems to have devoted most of it in the attempt to acquire every book ever published. One who knew him called Phillips "vain, selfish, dogmatic, obstinate, litigious and bigoted."

Vellum is a very fine parchment made from calf's skin, and, as Phillips learned more about the book trade, his propensity quickly ran toward vellum, and he called himself "a perfect vello-maniac" and "paid any price asked."

Actuated by knowledge of various bibliocausts, Phillips wrote in an early catalog of his collection, "In amassing my collection, I commenced with purchasing everything that lay within my reach, to which I was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts." He liked the idea of having so many rare books that great scholars would be forced to ask him to use his library. And scholars did indeed use his immense, perpetually-metastasizing collection. I imagine it was a tremendous thrill for Phillips.

Phillips was well aware of great collectors who'd preceded him, but they didn't have some opportunities he'd had, history's vicissitudes throwing some fortune his way with, for example the French Revolution. Phillips: "There must be vast treasures upon the Continent in consequence of the dispersion of Monastic libraries by the French Revolution."

By the end of his life, writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books, "The collection Sir Thomas Phillips left was so enormous that a full century of inventories, private sales, and auctions was necessary to sort it out. The bad news, for the British Museum at least, was that the man did not have it in him to give his collection to the nation outright; the nation's error was its failure to make a reasonable offer. But collections serve civilization in many ways. The irreplaceable material Phillips rescued can be found today in institutions all over the world where they serve scholarship. This was not his intention, but it was his legacy. Once the Court of Chancery declared in 1885 that his will was too restrictive, dispersal was possible." (p.122)

What was in Phillips' will? When he died he was bitter, confused, cantankerous and illogical. What reader is surprised at this? He willed that his books all stay in the same house (Thirlestaine), that no bookseller or "stranger" ever be allowed to arranged them, that one of his daughters and her husband never be allowed among the collection (Phillips had disapproved of the marriage), and that "no Roman Catholic should ever be admitted" to his library. He had not left enough money for upkeep of his library; his will toward his books was totally unrealistic. His favored son-in-law, the Reverend John Fenwick, said of Phillips after his death, that the man "pleased no one in life, and I expect he has managed to displease everybody in death as well." (p.122, ibid)

A Quote
"If you want people to read a book, tell them it is overrated." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Bed of Procrustes, p.11.

Finally: Time Enough At Last
When I was 12-18 I was obsessed with the old black and white Twilight Zone series on TV, which had its original run from 1959-1964. There's one episode, "Time Enough At Last, in which a meek bibliophile/ardent reader, takes his lunch break in his bank's deep basement vault, where he can read in quiet before going back to work. While down in the depths, a nuclear attack levels the area, and he emerges, like some pathetic rodent, surveying the devastation. The wonderful thing: just as he's about to commit suicide, he realizes the public library's books were not incinerated in the blast (poetic license!), and this meek little guy, played by the illustrious Burgess Meredith, has time enough to read, at last. Here's the ending of the 22 minute episode:

Books, Borges, and The Library of Babel

I recently read yet once again Borges's very short story, "The Library of Babel," mostly for its invocation of an ineffable infinitude. The first time I read this story it knocked me on my ass, and it haunted my daydreams. Imagine a library that contained every book ever written, every book that would ever be written, in every language, including a book that was your autobiography, a book that would vindicate our lives, that probably many books were written in code, and if you could just learn how to crack it, things would come together, yet no one has ever been able to decipher any codes; a book that was the key to all the other books, and a legend of a Librarian who knew this book...but almost all of the books are filled with gibberish, random letters thrown together, and presumably innumerable copies of Don Quixote, every one with one letter or punctuation mark different from the others...and there is no order...

I find that I think of this library quite often, and if enough time has passed between one reading of the piece (it seems more like a piece than a "story" to me), then my imagination has glommed onto one or two ideas in the piece at the expense of others, or I find, upon a new reading, that my memory, probably influenced by the vertiginous aspect of the piece, has invented something new that's not really in the piece, but seems plausibly aligned with its spirit.

                                     Escher, of course. I see Borges's Library here, too.

The Wikipedia article on Borges's piece links the original idea of the stupendously massive number of possibilities of books to 13th century philosopher-magician-mystic Ramon Llull's imaginary device, called now a "Lullian Circle" that could generate a near-infinity of possibilities. The metaphor of the library has proven absurdly fecund, and I've stopped keeping notes whenever this monstrous library is used by a contemporary writer to get a point across. I think some of us are enchanted-unto-haunted by the notion of infinity.

The Wiki article links to ideas from Kant, kabbalah, and Quine. The philosopher Daniel Dennett is mentioned also, with regard to DNA permutations and what was/is possible; if you read Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea and the "Library of Mendel" you get an insight into the dizzying possibilities of the mathematics of genetic mutation. Similarly, Robert Sapolsky used Borges in discussing the idea of biological convergence in The Trouble With Testosterone. In Richard Preston's book Panic In Level 4 there's a story - true! "non-fiction" - of two Russian brothers, the Chudnovskis, both mathematicians, whose driving ambition is to use as many computers as they can to carry out pi  to...just an absurd number of places, really. And Preston invokes Borges's idea: what if, somewhere in the vast depths of the seemingly random pi, there's suddenly a mathematically-proven explosion of non-randomness? Getting involved in infinity seems to attract the weird ones. Show of hands? (Or does infinity's clutches render one, over time, less sane?)

One of my favorite books to pick off the shelf in my quite-finite library is Randall Collins's The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, which runs to nearly 1100 pages. It's an astonishing work; get your hands on it, if only for half an hour someday. Collins writes about present-day intellectual life and says:

"The totality of knowledge today resembles Jorge Luis Borges's circular library, with endless volumes on endless shelves, and inhabitants searching for the master catalogue buried among them written in a code no one can understand. But we can also think of it as a magic place of adventurously winding corridors with treasures in every room. It suffers only from surfeit, since new and greater treasures are always to be found. Borges's image has the alienated tone characteristic of modern intellectuals, but the underlying problem is the inchoate democracy of it all, the lack of a master key." (pp.41-42)

Supposedly Gertrude Stein once said something like, "There ain't no answer. There never was an answer. There ain't never gonna be an answer. That's the answer." This lack of a key seems to me the key, the answer to the riddle of this particular sphinx. We will make and construct, like a teeming mass of bricoleurs, our knowledge. Has fantastical knowledge already appeared and been criminally neglected, for whatever reason? I suspect it has. We must expect such things, however sad.

A funny thing about Borges: it seems the sufis have been claiming him since the 1960s as one of their own. A well-stocked library will yield multiple titles that link him with sufis. Which I accept on the face if it. I've read a couple of those books. But then, I accept sufis indiscriminately. Philip K. Dick was said to have been reading Borges at the end of his life, according to PKD acolyte Gregg Rickman, in his Philip K. Dick: In His Own Words. Erik Davis, in my eyes one of our three best writers on contemporary esotericism, or as he calls it, "occulture," has argued that magical realism - commonly linked with names like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, had as its forerunners Borges and H.P. Lovecraft. (See Book of Lies, edited by Richard Metzger, p.139)

For fellow Robert Anton Wilson scholars, he named Borges as an influential "experimental modern" writer, along with Joyce and Faulkner, in an interview with Charles Platt in 1983 or so. In a letter to his friend Kurt Smith, RAW compares Borges to Wilde and Yeats. (!) In his book Chaos and Beyond, he mentions Borges as "avante garde" along with Joyce and William S. Burroughs. In an issue of his magazine Trajectories RAW lumps Borges in with a large cast of guerrilla ontologists, tricksters, postmodernists and others he calls "codologists."

Hakim Bey, AKA Peter Lamborn Wilson, definitely a sufi of some sort, writes in Immediatism, "Books? Books as media transmit only words - no sounds, sights, smells or feels, all of which are left up to the reader's imagination. Fine...But there's nothing 'democratic' about books. The author/publisher produces, you consume. Books appeal to 'imaginative' people, perhaps, but all their imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with a book, letting someone else tell the story. The magic of books has something sinister about it, as in Borges's Library. The Church's idea of a list of damnable books probably didn't go far enough - for in a sense, all books are damned. The eros of the text is a perversion -- albeit, nevertheless, one to which we are addicted, & in no hurry to kick."(pp.34-35)

This nails me pretty well, and links with a long line of drug-like-addled, Lotus-Eating book-readers, intoxicated by the text, at times finding what we so laffingly call "real life" a tad wanting, when it comes to the worlds in books, our habitations of, as Hamlet said when asked what he was reading, words, words, words...

Well, I had wanted to write about a number of things having to do with books - as my title says - and yet I've been carried away by Borges and his damned infinitude. In one of my all-time favorite books on reading, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, he talks of his time spent reading aloud to blind Borges, and that reading aloud changes a text one has already read, but reading aloud to a guy like Borges, who chose the text, was another thing entirely. "Reading out loud to the blind old man was a curious experience because, even though I felt, with some effort, in control of the tone and pace of the reading, it was nevertheless Borges, the listener, who became the master of the text. I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven, for whom there was no other responsibility than that of apprehending the country outside the windows. Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible." (pp.18-19)

Manguel says while reading, he was constantly reminded of other texts to compare the current one with, or to note the similarity of emotions evoked by this text and that one. He quotes another Argentinian writer, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, who says, "There are those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings. This is one of the most delicate forms of adultery." Manguel then notes that Borges did not believe in systematic bibliographies, and encouraged this sort of adulterous reading.

                                 Holland House, West London, after a Nazi bombing, 1940
                                 I've always loved this picture. Stout chaps, those! Stiff 
                                  upper lip and all that doncha know? Wot? Stoic as all hell!

Book Kulchur: A Few Word-Blobs

John Keats, writing - using a sort of "pen" and ink medium on a form of "paper" which was called a "letter," in 1819 - to his betrothed, Fanny Brawne:

"Give me books, fruit, french wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know."

Romantic? I think so. But I need to turn off the music in order to fully read a book; I find music too attention-grabbing, and I fancy myself an anti-multitasker. Perhaps Keats wanted all those things serially, against the backdrop of fine weather. I find I wonder about the musician he doesn't know.

At any rate, on with books!

A Few Odd Items, First Up: North Korea
"Imagine a world in which no one has written a literary novel in sixty years," writes Adam Johnson, the author of The Orphan Master's Son, set in North Korea, a country he visited in 2007, and which he writes about HERE. North Korea really has zero, zilch, nada for book culture. What an astounding monstrosity! The stories I've read about North Korea, both before Lil' Kim's demise and after, make even this peacenik think martial thoughts having to do with freeing those robotic humans. The entire idea of totalitarianism that..."total" almost leaves me speechless. No books, no expression of personal thought, no creativity, no...personalities. All because some little dipshit's family line got away with the Control Game long enough to, effectively set up an alternative "reality" in each citizen's mind. Every time I contemplate North Korea, I find myself mired in a mixture of fear, strong loathing, and sadness. The very idea that the corporate news media and political parties have been hard at work equating North Korea with Iran! Iran is a youthful country that loves Western ideas, is quite literate, and they're kept down by ayatollahs and a military authority. But their people are worldly, and I am duly nervous that their leaders are going to force some military showdown over Israel. Or maybe Israel will start it. Hey! I was supposed to talk about books, but I went off about who got to read and write books, and loudmouth worthless authoritarian monsters in North Korean and Iran. Sorry!

But let me get this in before I move on: Christopher Hitchens's article, "A Nation of Racist Dwarfs." RIP, Hitch.

451 Fahrenheit Familiar
Need more proof in a lack of God? Compare and consider North Korea's poverty and booklessness with this incredibly depressing story by S. Peter Davis. It's absurd, painful, ironic, and devastates a dead-tree bibliomane like myself. But damn! I envy Davis's mordant humor. The story is about 6 Reasons We're In Another Book-Burning Period in History and it's explained well, and I can't believe it, but it's hilarious. Darkly so. Davis also writes a wonderful blog/website, Three Minute Philosophy, and if you hadn't read it - or watched it, rather - before, you can thank me later.

Yep: tens of thousands of often old, irreplaceable books are being surreptitiously yanked from the shelves - mostly from university libraries, as I gather from the context of the article - and warehoused, then burnt. And Davis tells us all the good reasons why. If you're in a hurry, at least look at the pics and the captions. This piece reads like gonzo investigative journalism by a writer-comedian reporting from the sewage treatment plant, where you didn't know things had been going wrong for a long time, but they have...and writing it in a sort of True Confessions tone. The title of the article could've been, "I Burn Books For A Living Because Somebody Has To." Oy!

The #1 reason - E-books - is something I'll write about in the future. (Spoiler alert: I hate the goddamned things.) But anyone who's had to do a rotten job has to feel at least some sympathy with others in similar circumstances. When Davis writes:

"When your entire local library can be replaced by a USB drive the size of your fingernail, the only thing keeping those books out of an industrial-sized furnace is people who have some innate fondness for books. And there isn't much room in this economy for innate fondness." ...you have to sorta shut up and take it. I have the innate fondness. It's a good bet you do, too. But after reading his other five reasons...Having worked in public libraries, I was aware of the counterintuitive reasons why burning books is cheaper than giving them away, and have tried to explain to a few people, always to meet with incredulity and outrage.

John-Reading
Turning towards the more local world, in an article in The Guardian from this past October, Ian Sample tackles the thorny problem of the safety of reading while "going to the loo," to put it Brit-delicately. Reading while taking a crap, to put it bluntly. It turns out to be pretty safe, as long as you wash your hands afterwards. Sample can't help but pun as much as he can about feces and us, even in an article ostensibly about health, and I can't say I wouldn't have treated the matter the same way were I being paid to write the piece.

Reading material in the bathroom, that multiple people might pick up and read? If it's absorbent paper, probably no worries. If it's a glossy magazine cover, make sure you wash well. If you're one of those abhorrent people who use your Kindle, iPhone or iPad while snapping one off, that bacteria can stay on there longer than you think. Serves you right. Oh, and plastic book covers probably need a bit of Purell every now and then, too.

Val Curtis is mentioned in the article. Curtis is writing a book on disgust, and says that we've evolved our disgust to avoid infectious risk, especially of other people's...bodily wastes. Which reminded me of my friend Mark Williams, an English teacher in Wilmington, California. We were sitting around one night drinking wine and he suddenly observed that if you use "throw-up" as a verb, it's not disgusting: "I think I'm going to throw-up." But, oddly, if you use it as a noun, "Look at that throw-up over there near the windowsill," it's pretty disgusting.

Mr. Williams is in charge of educating our high school students.

Men of the Stacks
A bunch of male librarians got together and did a beefcake calendar, with the proceeds going to support anti-bullying campaigns and the "It Gets Better" movement and in general, LGBT causes.
Two articles on it HERE and HERE.

                                 Mr. January, Zack. The male librarians wanted to combat a
                                 prevalent stereotype about themselves. I include this pic here
                                 partially to make up for the pic of Winona Ryder, recently.

On the Minority of Long-Form Readers
It appears that the percentage of the population who make a lifetime of long-form reading, for pleasure, with several hours devoted to a "deep attention" to a single text, has always been small. In THIS excerpt from Wheaton College English Professor Alan Jacobs's book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, I learned that there was a brief blip of a relatively large percentage of the population in Unistat who were practicing deep attention long-form reading, from roughly 1945 to 2000 (the first G.I. Bill users and their children making up a lot of this), but now the reading practice has returned to what it probably always was: a well-practiced skimming for information. Prof. Jacobs mentions three sociologists from Northwestern and their study on long-form reading: it seems people who like to read long, weighty, dense books of literature are born and/or born and a bit made. It seems an inevitable small minority. There are people who will do long-form reading but not enjoy it much, and even they seem a minority. It seems likely that, during the statistical blip of Cold War Unistat higher education, a lot of students were doing forced deep attention, and that probably was not enjoyable.

There's a quote from Steven Pinker in the article that made sense to me: "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be bolted on." And the bolting is difficult, and many don't like being bolted. Even most of the ones who appreciate the attempt at the bolting don't entirely take to long-form reading. It seems there has always been a "reading class," and it's found in all social strata, from rich to poor, from the academically attained to dropouts.

At the beginning of the 20th century, about two percent of the population went to college; it's now 70%, and kinda disastrous, for many reasons. I go into some of it HERE. Professor Jacobs seems to have made his peace with the 21st century reading culture that needs to, as one M.I.T. grad student put it, "skim well."

Jacobs makes the point that the non -"reading class" folk can be brilliant and very intelligent. Of course! We simply can't seem to force students into loving long-form reading. Perhaps it's a spandrel or a culturally-acceptable form of a-social behavior...

The sections from the excerpt about information overload versus "filter failure," the contrasting modes of "deep attention" and "hyper attention," and the quotes and anecdotes from the 17th century French scholar, Erasmus, Augustine, and Sir Francis Bacon were interesting to me. But what really got me going was the brief discussion of a book I have not read, Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, mainly because it sounds so similar to Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which really knocked me out when I read it in the late 1990s. The idea that the workers took their autodidacticism very seriously and read the classics closely, for knowledge was power...these people are close to my heart. Levine writes about the construction of High Culture and the appropriation of Shakespeare and Bach by the wealthy elites. Apparently something similar happened in England, and around the same time it happened in Unistat.

Jacobs relates Roses' findings and mentions that the working-class autodidacts were more dynamic and passionate about reading classics before the general curriculum change of teaching English Lit with the Education Act of 1870. You can hear someone echoing down the halls of history, "But we were only trying to help!" If you read Jacobs's article or Rose's book you ought to note well the distrust among the working class readers and writers found in this line from Rose, quoted by Jacobs: "The only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational opportunities with suspicion."

Finally, I am forced to acknowledge that, near the end of the excerpt, Professor Jacobs tells how he was becoming increasingly distracted from deep-attention long-form reading for pleasure until his Kindle rekindled it for him.

Books and Reading: Rifflings

I finally got to a book I'd "been meaning to get to for awhile now" (this represents quite a large set) recently, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, a 2009 non-fiction book by Allison Hoover Bartlett, and her meetings and interviews with a sociopathic (probably?) book thief named John Gilkey. This guy would pull credit card scams just to get hold of first editions, and he never really seemed to be interested in reading them; rather, he wanted to build a rich man's book collection because he thought he was entitled to own an impressive collection of books. It's not fair that other people own these just 'cuz they have a lot of money, Gilkey seemed to think. And then Bartlett (in a page-turner in the "New New Journalism" style), in a meditation about why this seemingly nice guy, unthreatening, non-violent, would risk multiple returns to prison for such a thing, realized, after Gilkey said something about how others would see his books and admire him for owning them , that mere ownership confers an identity, an existence that might allow Gilkey to escape into another life.

Bartlett visits Gilkey's childhood home, and the family were all collectors, so there's obviously something genetic going on there, but Bartlett does not muse on genes. The book is a sort-of True Crime delight, filled with antiquarian book lingo, and Bartlett's search for understanding the mind of Gilkey, who is probably in prison again for book theft as you read this, or is stealing books on the outside, and will soon go back to prison. (Let's hope Gilkey gets it together, but I ain't bettin' on it...)

It turns out Gilkey lived and stashed his stolen gems of books on Treasure Island, a tiny, man-made island between Oakland and San Francisco that anyone driving the Bay Bridge passes by every time they cross that 7 mile span. I've never heard of anyone who actually lived there. Now every time I drive through Treasure Island I'll think of Gilkey, along with the fog. (That's another thing I love about books: you can inhabit them, then meld worlds when you visit those places in "real life." I grew up in Los Angeles, so I "know" what Charles Bukowski or Aldous Huxley or Raymond Chandler are getting at, in a certain and somewhat rare way. But I guess all the great cities have their writers, and citizens who read like me...but all I can really say is that sometimes you can get a wonderfully odd feeling. Like I know exactly the spot where Jack Nicholson's character Jake Gittes in Chinatown parks in San Pedro, and puts his watch under Mulwray's car wheel. I know exactly where The Dude and John Goodman blow Donnie's ashes into the ocean, in The Big Lebowski. Do I make any sense here? Oh, I see that I've wandered into a nearby blogpost by accident; let me see if I can make it back.)

If I own a first edition, it's not anything anyone would want to collect. I think I understand a bit of Gilkey when it comes to my signed books. I have about 15 of those, nothing to jump up and down about, but an odd, probably Freudian thrill. Very many of my own books were bought for less than $2 each at yard sales or library sales. I like having the physical objects, the tactility of books, their odors (even though very many of my books were housed in boxes in a garage for a long rainy winter on the Los Angeles Harbor, and contracted tiny mold spots), but mostly for the "Gumby"aspect of them. (The wha?)

A few years ago I took a class on how to teach adult illiterates how to read. On the first day of class, the teacher went from person to person and asked what literary figure we identified with, along with our names, and why we wanted to teach an adult illiterate. People gave the usual suspects: Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, and one pretty gal said, memorably, Holly Golightly (!). When my turn came I said I wasn't sure if my character was in a book, but he was a claymation figure who had a peculiar relationship to books, Gumby. The teacher seemed baffled. So I sang, quite off-key, "He can walk into any book, with his pony-pal Pokey too..." and explained that I saw each fictional book as representing a "world" and thought that, neurologically, part of us must somehow "believe" we are "in" that world when we are reading. I think I was officially the Class Freak after that. Nothing new for me, that is...(But c'mon! That Gumby stuff by Art Clokey? Just try and tell me that wasn't Clokey after...umm...becoming...ahhh...as Jimi Hendrix said, "experienced." Oh wow: my brother and I were watching LSD-inspired "art" before we shoved off to elementary school every morning.)

No but seriously: when we read, we ought to "be" in the world of the book. Or at least my aesthetics says so. I do read, say Ulysses with my consciousness alternating between being in Dublin on June 16th, 1904, and in the minds of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly, AND I'm thinking of Joyce and his style and virtuosity and knowledge AND I'm watching my mind make those movements in and out of the book. And I just began yet another reading. Let most Unistatians have their Bible-bibles; I have Ulysses, The Illuminatus! and Schrodinger's Cat trilogies, Gravity's Rainbow, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pound's Cantos and a few others.

I have been riffling through an amazing and wonderful book from the public library called A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, by a Venezuelan erudite named Fernando Baez, who is an authority on the Library at Alexandria. The book took him 12 years to write and it's just marvelous. I spent a couple of hours delving randomly in it, and experiencing the unique emotional pain of such losses of books over humankind's history, since books were written. How odd these strong emotions about books. And books were destroyed since the time they were written, as Baez says in his first chapter, on Mesopotamian books:

"No one knows how many books were destroyed in Sumer, but 100,000 is a plausible figure, given the number of military conflicts that ravaged the region. Archeology reveals the existence of these ancient books. Excavations of the fourth level of the temple of the fearsome goddess Eanna, in the city of Uruk, uncovered tablets, some intact, others in fragments, pulverized or burned, that can be dated between 4100 and 3300 BCE. This discovery contains a great paradox of the Western world: the discovery of the earliest books also establishes the date of their earliest destruction." (p.22)

Baez's book runs chronologically, with the last section centered in the 20th century, with fascism, China and the Soviet Union, censorship battles, an entire chapter on Spain, Chile and Argentina, and the looting of Baghdad in 2003, of which Donald Rumsfeld is quoted as saying, "Stuff happens. [...] Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes, and do bad things." I am one who thinks it would be good for all of us if Rumsfeld were on trial in The Hague. All this, while a former Iraqi library director said, "I can't remember barbarity like this, not even from Mongol times."

A chapter (number 18) that I found especially fascinating was "Books Destroyed in Fiction," with plenty about my favorites: Borges and Lovecraft, Poe and Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson and Cervantes all playing parts. In here there is much on authors and their inventions of "dangerous books," which is a topic that has long fascinated me: the "demonic" power of books.

And then I realized: this whole book is really about that subject; but most of the times the humans who had the power to demonize books were emperors and Caesars and chancellors and kings: books and the ideas in them threaten power. These autocrats and fascists and bullies may have been power-mad and murderous, but they were and are right about books, I think. And for that I take a perverse pleasure: they may burn them, but they continue to rise.

Blogger James Bridle has a good-looking review of Baez's book here.

Now, if only we can get more people to actually READ them.

Books, Reading, Memory

When Timothy Leary first began to be hounded for his advocation of "internal freedom" he was asked about the dangers of hallucinogenic drugs for some young people, and don't you think we should keep them from such drugs?

Leary, playing out (basically) the same cultural script Giordano Bruno played in the late 16th century and Socrates twenty centuries before Bruno said yes, we should keep kids from finding out about their own nervous systems. And furthermore, close all the libraries! Because books have caused far more damage than drugs! Look at the crazy - even murderous - things done in the name of some ideas someone read in a book! Aye, Leary was flippant. But isn't there a kernel of truth there? Or more than a kernel?

I say yes! To the unprepared mind, or the mentally unbalanced, books are freakin' dangerous things! And I call History to the stand as my first witness!

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

While openly admitting my life of inveterate-unto-stupefying reading has produced quasi-psychedelic moments, I think on the whole my reading has lead me to understand the "Lotus Eaters" section of Homer's The Odyssey quite deeply. Because books are more opioid (or narcotic?) for me than any other drug. Marshall McLuhan ingeniously wrote about different media as distinct environments. The fact that I was holding a "book" and decoding 26 letters in their combinations as "words," with adjunct punctuations, eyes moving left to right, left to right, decoding and visualizing, decoding and left to right, silent subvocalizations as I read, an abecedarian heretic of the worst sort, left to right, left to right, decoding and glossing abstract printed letters, words, left to right, left to right (psst! you're doing it right now!!!)....THAT was an "environment!" THAT was "the message." The "content" of the book was minor, compared to the historical fact of me (and you) doing those mental gymnastics that were now second nature to us.

And millions of people doing that since Gutenberg? The fallout was tremendous, and not entirely healthy. (Wanna blow your mind? Check out McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy. There you'll be, sitting quietly reading McLuhan's incredibly abstracted-from-actual-experience 26 letters plus peripheral marks and he'll be telling you what that very thing did to the Mind of Europe, over a period of 400 years. You gotta hand it to Irony. She gets the upper hand in the gol-derndest ways.) 

McLuhan once wrote about the environment of the morning newspaper. I'll never forget it: the newspaper was an avant-garde collage! The way it absurdly juxtaposed stories of war and bankruptcy with an ad for an elegant lady's evening dress and dimestore baldness cures. And yet, Daddy got into it like he got into his warm bath...Actually, that's a lot like what books were/are for me: opiate, but my mind is buzzing, alive. My interiority is jumpin'. I want to be enchanted, even by some book on semiotics, or a few pages of Hegel, or even a history of mathematics. Fiction? That's mainlining the good stuff. This enchantment is like a return to the opiate amniotic fluid-existence, and I'm safe and warm...But enough about me. Tell me a bit about yourself?

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The older I get the more I find I'm perturbed by how much I've read that I know I've read, and some of it made a major emotional impression upon me, but I can't tell you the title sometimes. Oh, it'll come to me in a minute. What were the main ideas? What was that guy's name? Well, it was mostly about how we respond emotionally to philosophical...no, that's not it: it was how I responded to it. But I wish I could tell you more. 

And yet I go on and on about books and ideas and a friend will say, "How can you remember so much of what you read?" I have no idea. It seems like the more I've read the dumber I've gotten! It seems like....no, I think it "is" true: the more I read the more I realize how ignorant I am! 

I never thought it would be that way when I was a kid. 

Noam Chomsky cheered me when I read an interview with him once. He said that when he was a kid he remembered...Oh wait I'll go find it in my stacks...

Ah, here it is:

James Peck: You once said, "It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called 'the full human person' than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do."

Chomsky: That's perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it's not only not unlikely, but it's almost certain. But still, if I want to understand, let's say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions. Look, there's no question  that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes - Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don't remember a thing about it, except the impact. (The Chomsky Reader, p.4)

This was Plato's big attack on this hot new medium of writing. It would degrade the old, pure medium: speech and memory. And we would lose our grip on the Real. Speech would become coarse, people would go out in the Agora and spout out things they had READ! (Television, anyone?) And I have a lot of problems with Plato, especially his proto-fascist utopian State, The Republic. But he may have had a point about that, like, ya know? That writing thing. Or did he have a good point? And what really was that point? Because, ya know...I forget.

Soooo...what have you been readin'? Anything good?