A friend told me about Cloverfield Press a while back — short fiction paired with art and letterpress-printed covers. Since I missed this Murakami story in The New Yorker (it’s only online in a terrible, abbreviated version) and never finished Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, I hadn’t read this one before. It’s a lovely piece on loss, and this little volume is a great way to read it.
I just learned the story is also a movie.
I have to preface this by saying that I haven’t actually read this whole book yet, but rather listened to some excerpts. I will appreciate the irony (noted by Gomez) that I will be reading a book about how reading paper books is dead when the time comes, but I wanted to put down some thoughts before I lost them.
Gomez submits here that the debate over the coming demise of printed books is moot, as print is already dead, much in the way that global warming may have already been tipped too far to be corrected. Basically, we are all just waiting for the technology that will free us from bound paper.
Part of his proof is that we already read so much online. This is the main point in which I disagree, personally — despite reading a lot online, I generally don’t read long texts online. Even New Yorker short stories I may read from their site get printed out (like this week’s Raymond Carver story). The longer pieces found in The New York Times Magazine also are too much for me to read online, and I generally just skim through until my eyes get tired. Many people I know say the same thing. Yet, if the right technology comes along, that could change, so I also kind of agree with him.
There are some interesting discussions on the Print is Dead blog, including one here where Siva Vaidhyanathan, a fellow at the Institute of the Future of the Book “think-and-do tank,” argues against considering the children of today as “Digital Natives.” He suggests it’s not accurate to judge trends by only looking at wealthy, white, educated people, but in some ways reading this exchange made me realize that it doesn’t really matter. If we do move into a total digital age where gadgets are a necessary means to read and become educated, it will likely make the divide between the educated and the uneducated wider and even more obviously defined by class lines.
When Gomez said in the book: It’s simply not possible that the Internet is going to have an effect on every area of our lives except reading books… I had to admit that it’s hard to argue against that, regardless of the implications. Sometimes I think my knee-jerk reaction to ebooks is largely rooted in questions of design. No one talks about what the pages on Amazon’s new Kindle read look like except to say there are more fonts than previous devices. I won’t be as defiant as Chip Kidd, but I will disagree with the second commenter on this printisdeadblog.com post who says:
I think my favorite example of The Book vs. The Words is Salinger’s entire collection. All of his books are published with nothing but plain white covers with seven little lines of color in the upper right corner.
I interpret his comment to mean that those books weren’t designed, as proof that it doesn’t matter how books are housed, it’s only the words that matter. But they were (likely with much control from Salinger himself) and are now iconic to many. You can tell someone is reading one of those particular Salinger paperbacks easily from ten feet away. That is, regardless of someone’s appreciation of the particular aesthetic, a successful design.
In that regard, I think we are losing something in this digital age where our media is delivered by gadgets. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This is probably my favorite short story collection that I’ve read all year. I find the collections I enjoy the most are those where all of the stories are rooted in certain commonalities while each one retains a distinctive feel and focus, as if the collection constitutes an exercise in working out all the possibilities of those few specific themes.
These are all set in middle-class black Philadelphia, often involve characters who grew up in the 1980s, and largely look to outline the various ways race and class can be intertwined yet also at odds. Another common element is nostalgia, both in the stories set in the past tense entirely and those where the characters themselves are looking back. Many of these characters seem to be yearning for something that has passed, whether it was a certain time of their lives or a belief naïvely held. It plays out with a variety of different lenses, including sexuality and religion.
This is kind of the academic version of Sex and the City, and I kept finding myself using the words “it’s kind of a ‘chick lit’ novel” in describing it. But it’s more than just a quirky novel about dating.
Our nearly-tenured heroine starts out by talking about the first line of Anna Karenina and how “literary types swoon over that line” but it’s “the most widely quoted whopper in world literature” (oops); she goes on to question whether stories can have endings that are both honest and happy. The whole discussion made me think about Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking, and whether it falls into that category of books that thankfully don’t fall into the pit of tragedy for the sake of the expectation that a “good” story has to at some point.
Elka described it as both “like how we write but brainier” and “fiction with cadence,” which are both pretty good descriptions. She also quoted this one line that made me want to read this book, which will surely stick around in my head for some time:
I sometimes think being shocked when romance lets us down is like joining the military and being surprised when people shoot at you.
