by David L. Ulin
(Sasquatch, 2010)
One reason for print’s primacy was that it was on the technological cutting edge. Like the blogs they resemble, most pamphlets came and went, selling a few hundred copies, speaking to a self-selected audience.
- page 6.
It is this, I think, that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives.
- page 10.
In their intimacy, the one-to-one attention they demand, books are fundamentally about engagement, that they require a context, that they reflect a writer’s place, his or her standing, a situation and a story.
- page 15.
... books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own.
- page 16.
For many years, I physicalized ... my reading, understanding cities by their bookstores, recalling trips in terms of what I’d read.
- page 18.
Part of the appeal was the stores themselves - the stores as landmarks, the stores, I may as well admit, as holy sites.
- page 18.
... this is what language, at its most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes. ... there is a nobility to the gesture, not least because it is preordained to fail
- page 32.
... to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise.
- page 34.
We live in an era when everyone wants to tell us his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.
- page 42
Reality TV blurs our sense of what real means; everyone survives on Survivor, after all. Meanwhile, the twenty-four-hour information cycle eats it all up, framing commentary as reportage and vice versa until we no longer know what is gloss and what is news.
- page 43
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
- page 44 (quoting Tim O’Brien)
In her 2005 book Rereadings, Anne Fadiman traces the distinction between reading and rereading: “The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged thee world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about he latter was that it contained the former; even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also say it through the memory of the first time I’d read it.”
- page 51
... what we, as a society, appear to have lost - is the ability to carry out a logical argument. For Lapham [Lewis Lapham in his 2004 book Gag Rule], that’s a consequence of the decline in reading and the rise of an electronic landscape in which everything has come to coexist in a never-ending present tense.
- page 65
This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every conversation back to our agendas,
skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew.
- page 67.
... we are a culture hat seems unable to concentrate, to pursue a liken of thought or tolerate a conflicting point of
view.
- page 67.
... time collapses in the act of reading - or both collapses and expands ... it is to be brought in touch with our commonality as human beings.
- page 69.
The novel has made a world in which people are fairly adept at both feeling and thinking
, and at thinking about feeling.
- page 70 (quoting 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley)
Perched on the cusp between the particular and the general, between expertise and common sense, the novel promotes compromise, and e specially promotes the idea that lessons can be learned, if not by the characters, then by the author and the
reader.
- page 70 (still quoting Smiley)
This is the point, that we livein time, that we understand ourselves in relation to its passage. It may be the thing that will ultimately devour us, but without it we lose a sense of who we are.
- page 73.
... the world is always too close at hand. I can check my e-mail in an instant, and twenty, thirty times a day, I do. What am I looking for? Something, everything, a way of staying on top of the information ... it doesn’t matter. The looking is an end unto itself.
- page 76.
It’s a key distinction, although often overlooked: that in a world of endless information (hyperconectivity, the 24/7 news stream, call it what you will), we face endless anxiety about our ability to keep up, to maintain a place amid the onslaught, to make sense of all the data and what it means.
- page 77.
... real reading ... demands space, because by drawing us back form the primacy of the instant it restores time to us in a more fundamental way. It’s not possible to read a book in the present, for books exist in many moments all at once.p
- page 80.
Perhaps the most important, there is the way reading requires us to pay attention, which cannot
help but return us to the realm of inner life.
- page 80.
Without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
- page 81 (quoting William James 1905 treatise Psychology)
Facebook, with its flow of useless particularity, makes it impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember. Memory is really the story left behind by forgetting - the essence that remains when the years have stripped away all that useless particularity. You remember as much by forgetting as you do by remembering.
- page 84 (quoting a 2009 Rich Cohen essay in the Los Angeles Times).
By transporting aspects of thought and memory to technology we are externalizing our mental operations. But both the mind and the psyche require internality.
- page 89 (quoting Eva Hoffman’s 2009 meditation Time).
... even on the most mundane terms, electronic memory strips a certain agency from our relationship with the
past.
- page 89.
How do we make room for narrative now that we can post or save everything - phone numbers, photos, videos, our most personal opinions - which alleviates us from the responsibility to remember any of it for ourselves?
- page 92.
If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong, we never have to wrestle with complexity;
if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don’t have to parse out endless shades of gray.
- page 94.
... the most essential distinction between books and pictures, moving or otherwise - the way the former gets at the outside form the inside, while for the latter it’s the other way around. Language is internal; it asks us to create our images, our movies, our realities form someone else’s words. This is the source of its power, that it is interactive in the truest sense.
- pages 97-98.
... as our brain chemistry changes, we do also, until the issue of what it means to be human is, in its own way, up for grabs.
- page 99.
To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single static object.
- page 100 (quoting Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains).
... if reading is not exactly active, it is assertive, connective even, in the most essential sense. ... The reader becomes the book.
- page 101.
... reading is a way to map, or imprint, certain emotional states or experiences, that it is a template by which we come to a reckoning with life.
- page 102.
Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.
- page 102.
Already, barely two decades into the Internet era, our brains have reconfigured, reverting to a kind of informational hunter-gatherer mode.
- page 103.
We take language and put it through a personal metamorphosis, reacting to it, reinventing it, making it our own. (The reader becomes the book.) The best books are those most open to such a process, the ones that seem to grow along with us, allowing us to inhabiting them in different ways at different times.
- pages 114-115.
... there is still a certain disconnect between where the culture is and where it’s going, between the machines that appear likely to define the future of reading and how we use them (or don’t use them) in the present tense.
- page 120.
I think in pages, not in screens; I like the idea of the book as object, of the book as artifact, of reading as a three-dimensional, tactile experience, in which the way a text looks or feels or even smells has an influence over how, or whether, I engage.
- page 121.
... if e-books privatize the public elements of reading, then the physical library effectively does the reverse.
- page 128.
... we find a different kind of memory hole, the hole of individual memory, the way our books reflect identity.
- page 129.
... this is one of the most powerful gifts the library has to offer, to represent not just our histories but also our imaginations, until past, present, and future begin to take shape in three dimensions, to occupy a space that, while outside us, stands in some significant fashion for who we are.
- page 129.
As readers, we are in a period of evolution. Although we still can’t multitask within an e-book, that moment is coming ... fast. Indeed, at the edges of the culture, we are already adjusting our ideas of what books are and how they operate.
- page 131.
... the core philosophical issue - is it still reading if we do it on the screen?
- page 133.
... the Net is making us smarter ... only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards. If we take a borader and more traditional view of intelligence - if we think about the depth of our thought, rather than just its speed - we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.
- page 133 (quoting Nicholas Carr from The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains).
In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies ,fostered their own ideas.
- page 134.
... the books I’ve downloaded to my iPod are not new to me, but rather works I know from other formats, from the physical, as well as the virtual world. In that sense, e-reading remains an ancillary activity, less about discovery than reassurance of a kind.
- pages 135-136.
... what is literature if not a gimmick, an illusion, in which we take the raw materials at our disposal (ink, paper, binary code, perspective) and fashion out of them a contrivance, an invention, an elaborate shadow play? The miracle is that we can believe any of it, that these tools, as imperfect as they are, can stir us into trusting something that is, on the most basic level, not actually there.
- pages 138-139.
... writers such as Joyce and Pound would have gone made for contemporary technology ...
- page 140.
... here again is what reading has to offer: the blurring of the boundaries that divide us, that keep us separate and apart.
- page 148.
I do not believe that anything is lasting; all of it will be taken from us in the end. Chaos, entropy .. the best that we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being. This is what reading has always meant to me and what, even more, it means to me now.
- pages 148-149.
This is the burden of technology, that we are never disconnected, never out of touch. And yet, reading is, by its nature, a strategy for displacement, for pulling back from the circumstances of the present and immersing in the textures of a different life.
- page 150.
Reading ... is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. It connects us at the deepest level; it is slow, rather than fast. That is its beauty and its challenge: in a culture of instant information, it requires us to pace ourselves. What does it mean, this notion of slow reading? Most fundamentally, it returns us to a reckoning with time.
- page 150
We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. As we do, we join a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged.
- page 151.
... reading becomes an act of meditation, with all of meditation’s attendant difficulty and
grace.
- page 151.