Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (5/5)

I like books, and therefore tend to like books about books and the bookly experience. Enter Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. An excerpt from the first chapter from the book, "Marrying Libraries," is available online. Fadiman has a somewhat unique experience, growing up in a family that is pretty much insane when it comes to the written word (as evidenced by proofreading restaurant menus together, weekly quiz shows, keeping logs of book & newspaper errors, and so on), and marrying another booknut husband. All of the essays are couched in this experience. Despite her... interesting family, the undeniable pleasure of books like this is the experience of seeing myself. It's like when you identify with a character in a movie, or when you read those silly descriptions about personality traits of your Zodiac symbol but you find yourself nodding your head, or just the simple joy of having a friend describe you accurately.

The essay that really got me was about compulsive proofreading. One of her editor's daughters "manifested the gene at an early age by stopping at dammed-up streams during family hikes and removing all the dead leaves." Oh, yes, that's definitely me when I was a toddler. And I was still doing it when I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail this summer. Fadiman goes on, still talking about me in a roundabout way:

The proofreading temperament is part of a larger syndrome with several interrelated symptoms, one of which is the spotting mania. When my friend Brian Miller, also a copy editor, was a boy, he used to sit in the woods for long stretches, watching for subtle animal movements in the distance... Proofreaders tend to be good at distinguishing the anomalous figure---the rare butterfly, the precious seashell---from the ordinary ground, but unlike collectors, we wish to discard rather than hoard. Although not all of us are tidy, we savor certain cleaning tasks: removing the lint from the clothes dryer, skimming the drowned bee from the pool. My father's most treasured possession is an enormous brass wastebasket. He is happiest when his desktop is empty and the basket is full. One of my brother's first sentences, a psychologically brilliant piece of advice offered from his high chair one morning when my father came downstairs in a grouchy mood, was "Throw everything out, Daddy!"

Spotting, check. Dryer-lint cleaning, check. Throwing things away, check. Fadiman is singing my tune.

There's another essay about sonnets and the struggle to write. In one passage, Fadiman looks over some of her sonnets and realizes that she "had mistaken for lyric genius what was in fact merely the genetic facility for verbal problem-solving that enabled everyone in my family to excel at crossword puzzles, anagrams, and Scrabble." Been there!

The fifth chapter offers a disquisition on the care of books. Fadiman posits two schools of thought. There are the courtly lovers, who argue "a book's physical self was sacrosanct, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller." And then there are carnal lovers: "a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy." I used to be strictly courtly, but I'm loosening up a bit these days. Just a bit.

Some of my other favorites were a heavily-footnoted essay on plagiarism (quoting Robert Merton: "Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born."), and another one on the joys of reading aloud. So Fadiman is really brainy, but most of the book had me laughing, too. In an extended disquisition on reading catalogs, she mentions "although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money." I'm sure that imagery will stick with me for a long time. It's one of those books that leaves you smiling at the end. When I put it on my shelf, there's that little tingle of joy knowing it was mine to take back down again. Sometime soon.

November 13, 2007

I, too, wonder why famous musicians don't put out as much music. "I'd feel a bit cheated if they couldn't put together more than three or four decent new tunes a year. These people are musicians, this is their job. In the mid-'60s, Bob Dylan was probably putting down three or four great new songs before lunch some days."

Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (review: 4/5)

I finished this one a couple weeks ago, but never wrote anything. In Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk writes with an eye to the reader's experience of comics. He avoids a lot of comics theory ("You already pretty much know what they are, and 'pretty much' is good enough"), focusing instead on loving criticism. It was really good. Some of his criticism was lost on me simply because I didn't know the comics he was writing about, but it was worth reading anyway. I don't remember the book well enough to write a lot. Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure I shared some quotes I enjoyed:

  • "Anytime a French word comes into play in an English-language discussion, you can be sure there are some class dynamics going on."
  • "The meta-pleasure of enjoying experiences that would repel most people is, effectively, the experience of being a bohemian or counterculturalist."
  • "There's a certain kind of rain that falls only in comics, a thick, persistent drizzle, much heavier than normal water, that bounces off whatever it hits, dripping from fedoras, running slowly down windowpanes and reflecting the doom in bad men's hearts." (aka eisenshpritz)
  • Following The Dark Knight Returns, "a sense of eschatology crept into superhero stories, as their battles became battles for the soul of modernity."
  • "There are two kinds of horrors stories. One is matin?©e horror, in which some kind of monster or grotesquerie rages across a landscape of innocence until it's finally destroyed and the natural order of things is restored. Its threat is neatly defined---it's Frankenstein, a vampire, a werewolf, a plague of zombies, a serial killer in a mask; there are always specific rules for how it can be beaten. The pleasure of reading the story is the pleasure of seeing justice done and the formula cleanly executed."

And that last one is broadly applicable to any genre. That's why action movies and romantic comedies work. I like that idea of the pleasure of seeing it executed. Aside from any literary merits of the work, that is the reader's experience. They generally know the expectations of the genre, the wonder comes from seeing how the author meets or betrays them.

November 11, 2007

Brian Sacawa on playing unfettered, taking classical music out of the grand halls and into alternative venues. A lot of the talk focuses on music groups reaching new audiences, but like he says, it can be great for the performers, too. It's liberating.

November 11, 2007

Since I moved a couple weeks ago from sub-suburban Atlanta to closer to the heart of town, my walk score went from 3 to 77. And what's more, there's the x-factor of actually having sidewalks.

Helvetica, the film

Just got back from the local Helvetica screening (presented by AIGA-Atlanta, sponsored by the Art Institute of Atlanta). It was good, but not great. Pretty cool for a relative noob like myself to see Helvetica's role in design over the past half-century. But I wish there was a little more nitty-gritty talk about how it came about, and less personal testimony and philosophizing about its ubiquity. One nice bonus was the post-film Q&A with director Gary Hustwit and type designer Matthew Carter. I didn't take a whole lot of notes, so you'll have to trust me on its overall worthwhility. But I do remember the three books that Carter most highly recommended: Letters of Credit by Walter Tracy, Modern Typography by Robin Kinross, and Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style.

1003

Oh, I just noticed that after a year and a half or so, my number of posts broke into 4 digits. This is number 1003. The number itself isn't that important, it's that I'm enjoying it enough to reach it and keep going. Time flies when you're having fun.

November 8, 2007

A long and awesome article about the Self-Transcendence 3100, a 3100-mile race run on a half-mile loop. In Queens, of all places.

Here was a kind of living koan, a race of invisible miles across a phantom plain wider than the continental United States. For fifty days, breathing miasmal exhaust from the Grand Central Parkway, the runner traversed a wilderness of knapsack-toting teenagers, beat cops, and ladies piloting strollers. Temperatures spiked. Power grids crashed. Cars also crashed---into the chain-link fence around Joe Austin park or into other cars. There was occasional street crime. One summer a student was knifed in the head. The runner endured. He crossed the finish line changed.