In general, I bristle with indignation at any post or tweet (or ad, or conversation, for that matter) that begins with "Best piece you'll read today....", or words to that effect. This may be due to the indelible memory of the prophecy delivered by the chair of a department to which I had applied for a job long (indeed a lifetime) ago. After my lecture, having escorted me to my accommodations for the night, he announced with perfect confidence: "This is the nicest hotel you will ever stay in." Never mind that the chair of a university English department that wanted to hire me had just ended a sentence with a preposition. I was outraged at the assumption that a Victorian guest house in a third-tier destination was to be the apex of my travel experience. Over the next several years I wantonly booked and stayed at several lavish havelis and converted palace hotels in Rajasthan; in ultra-hip boutique hotels with room service from great restaurants in New York; in Willa Cather's auratic cottage with spectacular views of the Bay of Fundy; in a converted 16th-century monastary high in the Sierra Madre in Puebla state... and in so many other unforgettable spots that I've in fact forgotten what the bloody small-town guesthouse in [________] even looked like.
As I was saying...I don't respond well to anyone telling me in advance what I will think or how I will experience something. But because @NiemanLab is often a Twitter source worth exploring, because its links usually net me something worthwhile on journalism and social media, I clicked through to what proved to be an interesting site, new to me, called posterous (http://mbattles/posterous.com/ ), which includes a blog authored by Matthew Battles entitled library ad infinitum: the republic of letters and the storm called progress. His post of October 21, 2009, under the title "the novel dies a thousand deaths," reproduces part of a letter from the novelist F.Marion Crawford to Stewart Gardner, dated August, 1896.
"The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?...A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius - over the everlasting telephone of course - published every morning for the whole world...."
Oh those clever Germans (cf. my post "Kant weighs in on Twitter, Part 1," but only after you cf. the images of Anselm Kiefer's work above and below). Battles is right to call this a "rich quote," which can be viewed from several angles. Here are his thoughts on the matter:
In the first [way to look at it], Crawford's vision is prophetic, if hasty. The nascent, steampunk, fin-de-siecle telephone network took a century to evolve into an internet. The struggle now is to comprehend and accommodate a daily exchange of ideas not among "men of genius," but among everyone with a connection.
But another way to spin this is to recognize the apolcalyptic mode for what it is: not a harbinger, but a self-renewing mode of modern consciousness. The telephone didn't kill the novel; neither did radio, television, or rock 'n' roll. Yesterday, Barnes and Noble announced that its own ebook reader, the nook, will connect using the AT&T wireless network - the evanescent digitized great-grandchild of Ma Bell (who was still in utero in Crawford and Gardner's time).
I like to think the two perspectives aren't contraditory. Eras end, media grow old, new modes of consciousness emerge. And so human life is enriched.
Matthew ends his post on a high note (memo to self - maybe that's what it takes to get the quantity and quality of the comments he elicited). In response, his reader Tim wrote a thoughtful and supportive note ("I absolutely believe this - so much so that I wrote my dissertation about it!"), which ended with a link that, via several other links (too many to reproduce), led me to the transcript of a BBC radio broadcast aired in July 1927. In that programme, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf debated a question that they had proposed to the producers in advance: "Are Too Many Books Written and Published?" The edited transcript, compiled by my colleague Melba Cuddy-Keane from pages preserved in the BBC Written Archives Centre and published in the journal PMLA (vol. 121, #1, January 2006, 235-244), is of great interest to the literary and cultural historian. I take this occasion simply to note down several of Virginia's arguments (Leonard's are also carefully drawn), with an eye to their potential value for reading across media in our own historical moment.
V.W. Yes, that is one of the great drawbacks of books. They last a lifetime. They take up space on our walls for ever. They need dusting for ever. How many times, after all, is one going to read the same book through? Of all the books in your library how many have you read twice? Yet there they stand, unopened and, I am afraid, often undusted, month after month and year after year. What is wanted is some system by which private libraries could be thrown open to other people, so that readers living in the same neighbourhood could use each other's books. The present system, by which each of us has a certain number of books locked up doing nothing on his shelves is the most wasteful that could be invented.
The concepts of waste and waste management will be of interest, along with the unavoidable matter of biodegradability and what we might term the cultural compost.
V.W.: ....Books will have to be cheaper. Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected - an ideal state of things in my opinion....
No space wasted, no dirt collected. Fine rules for a blog post.
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