Malefactor, at .40 nap, lamented the disturbance of silence; it set off a chain of thought that lead to this post.

Nothing exceptionally special happens on the Friday before Christmas, be it in 2005 or 1005. This past Christmas was no different. I was at the only bookshop in Singapore - Border’s doesn’t count - amid the throng, mindfully aware that it was the day before Christmas Eve; in order to validate my participation in this annual orgy of consumerism, I always, always, year after year, purchase books to offer as gifts.

I do so with Adorno’s lament in Minima Moralia echoing in my cavernous mind:

No exchanges allowed. – Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts. Violations of the exchange-principle have something mad and unbelievable about them; here and there even children size up the gift-giver mistrustfully, as if the gift were only a trick, to sell them a brush or soap. [...] Even private gift-giving has degenerated into a social function, which one carries out with a reluctant will, with tight control over the pocketbook, a skeptical evaluation of the other and with the most minimal effort.

Real gift-giving had its happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this. In the best of cases, they give what they themselves would have wished for, only a few shades of nuance worse.

To be sure, Adorno should never be read literally; less so the “reflections from a damaged life”. But, to speculate, this is the truth of the Seasonal act; the trauma of giving, the de-subjectivization of each gift. This Christmas, for my 15 year old niece, I took it upon her to give Umberto Eco’s The name of the Rose, in full certainty that she will not comprehend the myriad of intimations within. Perhaps, the sense of Eco will surface during her University studies; perhaps, this sense of literature will imbue her with a literary sense. For if reading is an act of exploration, an extending of our mental horizon, then books as gifts act as beacons to guide that path.

Seldom one to read “travel books” - I’d rather just go - Peter Moore’s Swahili for the broken-hearted came as a surprise. Together with Annie Caulfield’s Show me the magic: travels round Benin by taxi, these two were my first foray in to this genre. Sadly, the diagnosis is not good: strictly toilet reading. Read the rest of this entry »

I wonder what goes on in the mind of a publisher when sizing up evaluating a book proposal. Wit? Market segmentation? TV appeal? Jerry Springer potential? Pitch to the pained population?

Riquette Hofstein’s Grow Hair Fast: 7 Steps to a New Head of Hair in 90 Days begins in dramatic fashion with cinematographic intent:

In the summer of 1991, high in the Tyrolean Alps of Northern Italy, a team of archeologists and other scientists retrieved the preserved body of a man buried in the glacial fields

I bet Riquette can almost smell Hollywood beckoning. Almost, but not quite.

previous winners:

dumb book of the week iii
dumb book of the week ii
dumb book of the week i

So many books is Gabriel Zaid’s macro-history of the book. What it lacks in fluidity, it compensates with ample anecdotal antibiotics to cure curiousity of Biblical proportions. It prompted me to dash to the care of dusty tomes, and assuage a “to be read” shelf which at time of writing includes two Eco novels, the Alliez book (The signature of the world), Benjamin’s Arcades project and O’Donnell’s Augustine biography. Time, therefore, to itemise these great years of neglect, a testament to perennial regret. To that end, and with the year’s end in sight, what better way than to compile a set of resolutions for the coming year.

the basics:

The meagre collection of books that make up my so-called library is slowly inching its way pass the three digit mark. I remember a time when reading and book buying took place within some discernible framework. Those good ol’ days were marked by guidelines (reading lists, for example), coherent themes plucked from courses or degree programmes and corollary interests. These days, these uncomfortable, independent days know neither rhyme or reason. Therein lies a brutal laxtity.

The amazingly charged LargeHeartedBoy, however, has diligently filled the past 2 years with a “52 books, 52 weeks” column. What better way to fight this much maligned marginalisation? Not only that, but what if the reading is threaded, each leading seamlessly to another? In this way, the end book of 2006, though it will be of no particular significance as it is a mere transitory point on the great chain of Reading, will be predetermined. This makes for an unusually heavy choice of starting point.

books that missed their time:

Candidates, alas, cannot come from this long, impossible list which consist of Don Quioxte, Wuthering Heights, Lolita, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Crime and Punishment, Remembrance of Things Past, and Ulysses. This is my unhappy list of lost chances, and missed milestones. A Lolita not read in one’s teen years, or Crime and Punishment passed over during college days, cannot be readily re-claimed in the mid-way of one’s life.

Perhaps Homeric Moments, Eva Brann’s introductory literary landscaping of the Greek world? The symbolism of such a beginning should not be lost. A more respectable point of departure must surely be (Etonian) Robin Lane Fox’s The Classical World: an Epic history from Homer to Hadrian; but will I survive its 700 pages and live to tell its tale? Decisions, decisions. See reviews of The Classical World in The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Church Times and The Independent. Hmmm, reviews dampen the enthusiasm of delving into the relatively unknown. Or will Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? prove to be too weighty a first step? (NPR’s review).

Nevermind, a title will be decided upon and its review will appear here on the first Sunday of the year. Any suggestions?

I can’t talk to people who are … disabled

Sales guy at “Miss Sixty”, 3rd Street Promenade.

How’s the lice? … [in raised voice] How’s the lice in your hair?

Barnes & Noble customer to older, hard of hearing (?) friend. Is that what friends do?

LA has been fun for now. 5 days into the vacation and I’ve done all the major bookshops left in this part of Hollywood, with only three purchases. The best by far has been Dutton’s, one of a growing number of “community bookstores” in the trenches fighting against the brutality of Big Conglomerates.

Bad things happen to bad people. I was reading Andre Schiffrin’s The Business of Books (subtitled: how the international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read).

And it came true.

The itinerary for the forthcoming vacation to the West coast would have included a visit to “Midnight Special”, a specialist (read: leftist / critical) bookshop in Santa Monica. But it stands no more! One of the best bookshops in the LA region - and easily one of my favourites - has succumbed to the forces of global capital. Read more here in the Santa Monica Mirror. By the way, this closure follows that of the Waterstones’ specialist philosophy branch at Charing Cross and “Compendium” in Camden Town.

On days like these, one regrets being an Amazon associate. Imagine a world inhabited by chains such as Border’s, stocked with best-sellers donning oh-so-ugly covers. Imagine that world with Harry (book 1 thru 6) at the top of each reader’s consumer’s “to read” lists. For the inhabitants of this make-believe world, that Code book is somehow “better” than The name of the Rose.

A monster of our own creation. We are all responsible and we’re all going to hell for this.

further reading:

holtuncensored.com

bookmouth

feinstein.org
utah.edu

; ;

Interesting concept. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of books, unowned by any single natural individual and free for anyone to browse and absorb, guided by an idea that books are not primarily the vehicles of accumulation but of communal participation, what is now sometimes called a “knowledge base”. If we were able to envisage the most idyllic, serene, and outrageously personal habitat reproduced as a public space, would we still nonetheless tread willingly to participate in this experiment?

The scales are unbalanced, however, and the gravity of unreason out-weighs commercial considerations; despite being a local library’s “external borrower” (I feel so dirty), I feel some justification in procuring another ragbag assortment of knowledge-things, otherwise known as “books” - such as Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.

What if our reluctance betrays that we bibliophiles aren’t in it for the read? What if we are mere acquisitors, and of the shallow unreflective kind, and hence no better than our fallow human? We biblophiles are perhaps satiated not by the impact and not of the read as much as we anticipate and achieve tri-fold delirium - first upon selection, then procurement, with the closing coital arrival and unwrapping. Reading is near incidental.

This dissociative possibility, one which doubts the heart of reading, troubles us. My friend Nick, in his monthly column for The Believer, belatedly, 12 months into the contract between himself and The Reader, admits:

I bought so many books this month it’s obscene, and I’m not owning up to them all: this is a selection. And to be honest, I’ve been economical with the truth for months now. I keep finding books that I bought, didn’t read, and didn’t list.

So long as Nick keeps this dishonesty to his Readership.

The personal library is a living autobiography no less. It charts spikes, in curiousity for Trintarianism or some obscure tenet therein, periods spent navel-gazing (with or without Lacan), moments of simple bad taste (Is bad taste ever “simple”?). It is also an expensive, extravagent and expansive tool to track our whims and meanderings. That was the week in which I delved into Uzbek literature. That book was a corollary of my reading on Albanian sheep farming. And such like. The minutae of your trajectory is registered in your library. How else would I remember the impact of some Hungrarian theoretician secluded in Tom Bottomore’s Modern Interpretations of Marx? Or how would I have realised that an obscure book by Vincent Geoghegan was never entitled Marxism & Utopianism, but Utopianism and Marxism - I had prioritized the wrong pole, symptomatic of a largely pig-headedness inspired to right wrongs. Or that my battered copy of Styles of radical will came as a gift from Adi LeBlanc? (These meaningful relationships deter mechanisms such as Emeth’s Book Giveaway. To part with my decaying War & Peace, or even - secondarily - my annotated Hegel and Skepticism??).

We angstsy moderns wear our and everyone else’s anxieties on our sleeves. Mine jolted me out of bed this morning with a venom worthy of a jilted lover: it is not that my books will never see the light of the published day, but that they will be the ones that you see on display in IKEA showrooms.

Happily, I do not own nor do I intend to purchase or accept as a gift, the two monstrosities of modern publishing - The Potter franchise and that “Code” book. *shudder* While cataloging my library over at LibraryThing.com this lazy Sunday afternoon, I finally noticed how few bibliophiles are complicit in these two particularly distasteful franchises.

At time of writing, there are 3,957 copies of the 6-book Potter franchise out of a total of 645,611 books catalogued. That’s a shocking 0.6% of all books. Less than one percent of the total book population. Well done!

why this ought to be the case

It seems this is due to one’s Myers-Briggs personality type. We INTJs have a tendency to judge, judge, judge, you see, and hold fast to truthfulness. Hence the INTJ’s oft-repeated prayer:

Lord keep me open to other ideas, wrong though they may be

Click for more MBTI prayers.

the resistance

“Forthcoming Titles from J.K. Rowling”, brought to you by cautionarytale.com

Whim-purchased The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at the airport this afternoon, anxious not to re-live the debacle of the last trip when, ill-supplied of conjoined words, I quickly found myself without adequate mental matter. I started it during the flight to Surabaya but could not proceed beyond page 16, wherein the following passage halted all progress. Christopher

… was the name given to St. Christopher because he carried Jesus Christ across a river. This makes you wonder what he was called before he carried Christ …

This is the exact manner of phrasing that took place one autumnal evening in Earlsdon, Coventry. Virtually verbatim. I know this because I was there and can confirm that I said it thusly. Does this mean that I thought and spoke as an autistic child when I was in my mid-twenties? Does this mean that Mark Haddon accquired my 1995 memory chip? How did he and my friend, Nick Hornby, decide who gets what? I can’t imagine the two of them fighting over the chip’s contents, so perhaps they conducted an auction; how much was it worth, I wonder.

other nick hornby links:

my friend nick

westerbergian

31 songs