There’s old book smell and then there’s moldering in a smoker’s basement old book smell. For the latter, I find an afternoon splayed out in sunshine and fresh air will do wonders. Wouldn’t try it on any rare or delicate books, but for the merely out-of-print stuff I have to buy used, it’ll do. (I usually spend my days avoiding the Texas sun, but it has its uses.)
“It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy. Nobody wants to read your shit.”
—Steven Pressfield
I posted this innocuous photo of our living room bookshelves the other day and people started asking me all kinds of questions, like, “How do you organize your books?” (I don’t) and “What’s the book you gift the most?”
Sacrilegious for someone of my profession to say, maybe, but I don’t like giving people books unless they’re 1) books they’ve asked for 2) really nice editions of books they already love. Otherwise, it feels like giving someone work. “Did you read that book I gave you yet?!?” (You, though, you should buy lots of my books and gift them indiscriminately. Ha!)
Reading a book requires, by today’s dismal standards, an enormous investment of time and attention, and the writer either honors that investment or suffers the consequences. (As Vonnegut told us, a writer has to be “a good date.”)
In the first major interview with legendary comedy writer John Swartzwelder, “sage of The Simpsons,” he says:
Nobody wants to read a book. You’ve got to catch their eye with something exciting in the first paragraph, while they’re in the process of throwing the book away. If it’s exciting enough, they’ll stop and read it. Then you’ve got to put something even more exciting in the second paragraph, to suck them in further. And so on. It’s exhausting for everybody, but it’s got to be done.
But if you know you have to honor the reader’s time and attention with “good” work, how do you ever get the guts to sit down and write?
You have to be willing to be bad, first, and write a shitty first draft.
That is the whole trouble.
Swartzwelder suggests working with time, and the overnight magic of put it in the drawer, and walk out the door:
I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.
As the interviewer, Mike Sacks, summarized the method: “Create an imperfect world and then improve it.”
(Sacks has published two collections of interviews with comedy writers worth your time: Poking a Dead Frog and And Here’s The Kicker. And Swartzwelder’s novels are here.)
Okay, now I’m off to make something bad that I will fix later!
In his latest newsletter, my friend Alan Jacobs notes that Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is now fully online, and points to his 2006 piece, “Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges: Dr. Johnson and his Dictionary,” in which he recounts much of Johnson’s struggle putting together his book of words. (I was particularly sympathetic to Johnson’s disgust at his own “idleness” while holding a firm conviction that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I do love a man who contains multitudes… especially multitudes who hate each other.)
At the very end of the piece, Alan writes about the magic of paper dictionaries (emphasis mine):
Surely every user of dictionaries or encyclopedias can recall many serendipitous discoveries: as we flip through pages in search of some particular chunk of information, our eyes are snagged by some oddity, some word or phrase or person or place, unlooked-for but all the more irresistible for that. On my way to “serendipity” I trip over “solleret,” and discover that those weird, broad metal shoes that I’ve seen on the feet of armored knights have a name. But this sort of thing never happens to me when I look up a word in an online dictionary. The great blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you’re looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you’re not looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need books.
Fifteen years later, this is no less true: the magic of a paper dictionary is the magic of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s a magic that electronic texts, for all their usefulness and convenience, still haven’t touched.
The supposed “shortcomings” of paper are what, in fact, make it such a wonderful technology. Here’s Alan, again (with emphasis mine, again):
George Landow has written that “the linear habits of thought associated with print technology often force us to think in particular ways that require narrowness, decontextualization, and intellectual attenuation, if not downright impoverishment.” But it turns out that, when it comes to dictionaries anyway, it’s hypertext that narrows and impoverishes. The simple fact that I cannot pick up a dictionary and turn to the precise page I wish, or, even if I could do that, focus my eyes only on the one definition I was looking for — the very crudity, as it were, of the technology is what enriches me and opens my world to possibilities.
Get your paper dictionary today! You shan’t regret it.
Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:
Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.
Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.
Moby-Dick, for example, is a book whose force seems to me centripetal: after being pointed to it by other books, I found myself returning to it, again and again. It sucks me in.
The Writer’s Map, on the other hand, a glorious current read of mine, is a book whose force feels centrifugal: two chapters in, and I already have a long list of books and to chase down. It spins me out.
Both kinds of books can be extremely valuable to the reader, and I don’t think one kind is necessarily better than the other. I’m also not sure that these forces are objectively observed. One reader’s centripetal book could be another’s centrifugal, and vice versa. It’s also possible that a book can both suck you in and spin you out.
This, by the way, is not an original theory of mine. I first heard it from my friend Matt Thomas, over a decade ago. “Good movies, I find, are centrifugal,” he once tweeted. “That is, they spin you out—to other movies, ideas, art, people.” He’s also tweeted that he finds Facebook centripetal (it sucks you in) and Twitter centrifugal (it spins you out).
I asked Matt where he got this idea, of media with centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he pointed me to Susan Douglas’s book about radio, Listening In. I searched the whole book and only found this reference:
“Listening, argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”
(This passage speaks to Murray Schafer on sound, but that’s for another blog post.)
Again, I don’t want to place a value judgment on a book based on its centripetal or centrifugal force, but I do think that a centrifugal book can be of lesser quality and still retain its value, as its value is found in the things it spins you out to.
Matt suggested to me that there’s a third category of work: the work that doesn’t spin you at all, the work that doesn’t move you in any direction, the work that barely has any force to it.
These books are to be avoided.
What a completely bleak winter. Good riddance. Life always feels a little bit more tolerable when you have a good book to read, and here are 10 books that helped me through, listed in the order I read them:
The Biggest Bluff
Maria Konnikova
A writer who’s never played poker before learns the game and becomes a champion. Maria is a friend of mine, and I could be making this up, but it feels like one of those books where an author is coming into her peak skills while also finding a perfect subject for those skills. The mantra from Maria’s mentor, poker legend Erik Seidel, is perfect for our times: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”
“The Plague Year”
Lawrence Wright
Not a book… yet. 30,000 absolutely riveting words in The New Yorker, one of only a handful of times the magazine has devoted so much space to one piece. Wright is the perfect writer for the job, here: he wrote a pandemic novel that came out a month after lockdown began in the U.S. Wright is expanding the material into a book coming out this summer. (His book God Save Texas was on my favorites of 2019 list.)
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster
This was a new experience for me: I don’t think I’ve ever been more turned off by the design of a book (crude drawings and pesky endnotes) while simultaneously devouring it. “Fun is just another word for learning,” Koster writes. His definition of a good game is “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” (I wonder if we can apply that to books: A good book is one that teaches everything it has to offer before the reader stops reading. I like that.)
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard
“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” One of those infuriating books that lose you for a few pages and you start skimming and the very second you’re about to put it down and read something else, a sparkling gem of a sentence appears that you double-underline and scribble in your commonplace book, and gets you to start reading again.
One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Brian Doyle
A posthumous collection of an author I wish I’d read when he was alive. Maybe my favorite thing I read all winter. I savored a handful of essays each night in bed. If you’re new to his work, try his ode to the heart, “Joyas Voladoras,” or “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” There’s a big archive of his at The American Scholar. (Recommended to me by a newsletter reader. Thanks, Cate!)
No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
“You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” Think about how hard this is to pull off: a poet writes a bestselling memoir and then follows it up with a novel. (Priestdaddy was on my favorites of 2018, and I expect this to be on my favorites of 2021.) One of the most original writers of our generation. I will be instantly reading whatever she writes next.
Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal
The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal once worked as a trash compactor, and, according to the critic James Wood, he “rescued books from the compacting machine and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.” He based his wild, short novel on his experiences, giving them to the fictional narrator, Hanta, who says he “can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.” (Same.)
In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
The shortest book on this list, coming in at barely 50 pages. Written by a novelist and first published as an essay in Japanese before WWII. My favorite part is when he writes about the aesthetics of Japanese toilets. Seems like it might be a “problematic” text these days, but it gave me a lot to think about. (Recommended to me by an architect friend. Would pair well with Koren’s Wabi-Sabi.)
The Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy
Dave Hickey
My third-favorite Hickey collection after Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers. I read an essay for dessert after lunch each day for a few weeks. There are some really excellent essays here, but they’re mostly front-loaded at the beginning of the book. (I picked this up after reading a galley of Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.)
Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler
A dark, brilliant page-turner and very hard to read right now, given that it feels like we’re living in the prequel.
“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
(I wrote more about the book here.)
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