The Wonder of Books!

One in four Americans is basically illiterate, unable to read news articles, prescription information or the ever-vital holiday sale advertisements. The United States is now ranked 50th among the 191 countries of the United Nations in literacy rates. And this doesn’t even take into account the functionally illiterate; people who know how to read but merely choose not to.

Is this important?

Yes. But unfortunately, only people who read are probably aware of this information, and the information that follows:

Books can be used for a variety of things besides reading. You can prop up a table or bed, use a stack of them as a table, and the pages can be torn and used as kindling or for writing notes or even in lieu of toliet paper.

In May of 1797, Samuel Boddington of Philadelphia killed two Indians with a copy of the King James Bible. He claimed it was in self defense. His story has been widely circulated in academic rumor-circles as the first murder committed using a book as the primary weapon. Some say, however, that Boddington stabbed the two Indians (a young woman and adolescent boy) and then beat them with the book as they lay dying. Boddington was later heard boasting that he had, rather impossibly, stabbed the two Indians with the book.

But the Egyptians used large tablets made of stone, which might be considered “books” of a sort. And since an unknown number of slaves were killed using these as weapons, Boddington’s dubious place in history should be corrected as the first murder by a book printed on paper (and never mind the unsubstantiated multitudes of deaths via papyrus scrolls in ancient Greece. A scroll, no matter how long, is NOT a book).

The Omni-Y is the future. Everything is going digital. Books, magazines, newspapers will be a thing of the past! Webcasts, podcasts, streaming video. Digital books purchased a chapter at a time. Eventually we won’t even need books! The printed word is a pain in the neck… look, download a Franzen novel, read the New York Times. Want to see the latest stock numbers? How about the big game?

Everything is changing, and now it’s either modify or mummify. Soon, we won’t even need printers. Think of all the trees. Just think about that. Everything electronic. That’s the way the world is going and you better get used to it.

The Omni-Y is the future. It makes anything possible!

When I was a good reader (now I just read like a horse at a trough, thank you very much, graduate degree in English) I would go through authorial bursts; I’d find an author I liked and I’d grab hold and read everything written. Steinbeck, Hesse, Woolf, Dostoevsky, you name it. Oh I’d dabble too. Huxley, Morrison, Hemmingway, Walker, Silko… but a burst was something. I read everything written by James Blish over a month or so in 1987. Oh I’d do ‘trashy’ reads too, dimestore paperbacks by the fistful. Whatever. If walking or sitting or standing or shitting, I might as well be reading.

My last authorial burst was Edward Abbey, in late 1995, and something opened up to me, a realization; I saw in him what I saw in all the rest. For most authorial bursts, I wasn’t too sad about finishing an author because by the last book I’d understood the person, it was enough. But very often, toward the end things got shaky. They became broken somehow—on the inside. Slogging through the fifteen novels that occur after the Dune trilogy… I couldn’t do it. It became too much. The Glass Bead Game? Sweeping and epic, certainly, but none of that brevity, that power of brevity. These authors come to hold you with their bony hands to stay, stay. Listen. Listen to what I have to say.

It’s pretty sad when you think about it.

Okay I lied. I’ve had many authorial bursts since Edward Abbey in 1995. I was just trying to be dramatic. There has since been many—Murakami, Borges, Nabokov, and others—but it’s still the same; after a number of books, it fades, it fades.

Unless we’re talking dimestore stuff like King and Oates and Steele and Updike. They can pretty much can keep pumping out the shite until they die.

There is a distinct correlation between literacy and intelligence. People who read books are usually smarter than people who do not. End of story. If you don’t read books, you’re most likely a dumb ass. Go ahead and look it up. The statistics are overwhelming. Oh yeah, nevermind… you don’t fucking read. (and you know who I’m talking to)

Which isn’t to say that ‘smart’ people don’t often do stupid things, it’s just that when they do something stupid it looks really stupid, and friends and enemies alike will come out of the woodwork to point and guffaw. And it isn’t to say that people who don’t read can’t be smart every once in a while. Hell, it often makes them look smarter than they are (please refer to above explanation of the smart/stupid irony to understand the simultaneously correlative and opposite stupid/smart causal relationship).

You see how it works?

Anyway, the point is, people who don’t read books make less money, are more prone to crime and depravity, often smell bad, have that white spittle at the corners of their mouths, and are unlucky in love.

Children who grow up in homes filled with books are smarter, more likely to go to college, and less prone to psychological abnormalities, drug use, and chronic masturbation.

For a few winters between my firefighting job with the Forest Service, I made bookshelves at Booked Up, a little used bookstore owned by Larry McMurtry. Yeah, yeah. I met him once and he squinted at me and mumbled either ‘hello’ or ‘hi there.’

I always thought about the books going on to the bookshelf, how important it was over anything else. Sure, some of my bookshelves were squarer than others, sure a few listed to the side a bit (I’d bolt them to the wall anyway) but dammit, the edge had just a slight roundness to it. Just enough for a book to slide perfectly into its destination. Phip!

Once when making a bookshelf, I got a huge piece of wood stuck in my eye.

Okay, that’s a little deceptive. Really, I just wasn’t wearing any safety goggles and cut a board and an enormous piece of wood flew into my eye. So I was in agony. And I blamed books, the goddamn books.

I vomited in the car on the way to the doctor the next morning. The fucking pain! No amount of saline or potato held against my eye would draw out the gigantic hunk of wood imbedded there. The doctor tried to show it to me, an invisible fleck upon his medicinal-grade tissue, he kept pointing to it with his tweezers, but I knew that wasn’t it. There has to be more than that, I said. There has to be more, then I vomited again on the floor.

Instead of books, you can just read text in the Omni-Y experience! Download the file for uninterrupted playback later… even in the subway, on a plane, or out of your service area!

Books are technically words written on paper and bound together into a coherent whole. However, novels are what I’m really talking about here. You know, fiction. A non-fiction book isn’t really a book at all, but (hopefully) an interesting collection of facts. A novel can sweep you away, not with words, but with your own imagination. People who don’t read fiction have little imagination, and their brains are substantially smaller, atrophied due to this misuse of the mind’s eye.

People talk about the decline of fiction and the rise of non-ficiton, particularly memoirs. Memoirs are not books, but narcissistic endeavors driven by ego and solipsism. The individual human life is interminably boring and not very unique. Think about it… billions and billions of people on the earth over time, and then this one person thinks that their life is worth being represented in words?! Get over yourself. Everybody’s grandma dies. Please stop writing these goddamn boring incidents about your life.

The only thing worse than a memoir is a celebrity of some kind who writes a book. The only reason these books are published is because of the author’s status, not due to talent or an undying love for the written word. Not everyone should write a book and even writing a book doesn’t mean that it’s good, should be published, or deserves to be read by anyone.

Case in point: myself. As a lover of words, a fanatic reader since a child, someone who has devoted his entire life to reading and writing, even I have written a book. Hell, I’ve written two. They’re both sitting on a shelf in my studio apartment, gathering a blackened coating of New York City air. Nobody will publish them, and nobody will read them. This is not because of some conspiracy, but because they are not really good enough to be in print. And I know they’re broken… they’ve got wobbly wheels and are a grind to get through. I’m shooting for a decent book by the time I’m fifty. Decent. You know, as in not entirely bad.

I’m now starting on my third novel, much like any delusional person who chases after some illusive and vaporous vision.

There’s something about an old book. Not just an old book, but a book that has been read and re-read, loaned out and never returned to its rightful owner, read by strangers and lovers and enemies alike. A relatively new book can become old just by how much it’s read. You can feel it in the pages.

Sometimes I’ll turn a page of an old book and wonder; who has turned this page before me? Were they sitting while the kids yelled in the background? Were they on a train? In a car? On the couch? On the toilet? Lying in bed before sleep overtook them?

And sometimes I’ll come across something in an old book—a newspaper clipping, a pressed leaf or flower, a photo, a note to remember to buy cheese—and these things haunt me as much if not more than any word upon the page.

The Bible has been shoplifted or stolen more than any other book in the history of the world. Way to be, hypocrites…

I stopped going to the library after the Patriot Act was passed into law. Before that, I lived at the library. The library was my refuge. When other kids were playing or lighting things on fire, I would go to the library like a goddamned nerd. To this day, just smelling a library calms me down somewhat.

First was the Woods Memorial Branch in Tucson… the young adult section got me through middle school. In high school, I moved up to the Main Library in Tucson… until it moved from its historic building to the Po-Mo inspired monstrosity currently downtown. The University of Arizona Library put it to shame, and I spent unknown weeks perusing the many floors while studying there, ever on the lookout for the perfect spot. I eventually found it on the fourth floor, with grand views of the Catalina Mountains and what once was the U of A mall.

But then came the Patriot Act… and I’ll be goddamned if somebody is going to look at what I’m checking out, my own beloved government, no less.

Eventually, I made my way back. I go to the library now to read or study, to smell the books, to hear muffled coughs and unconscious mutterings three aisles away, but I never check out books. Now in New York, I love the Main Humanities Library on 42nd, the one with the lions out front. And though I study at City College, the library there really sucks and is often louder than the cafeteria. In my neighborhood, the Inwood branch caters to books in Espanol, which is just fantastic and multicultural. I really hope for books in even more languages, like Latin or Czech.

But I just cant check out a book, so sometimes I’ll thumb through them and read bits and snatches, but it’s always back on the shelf for you. There’s no need for my government to have access to my Blish burst or anything else.

Omni-Y is the wave of the future. It makes anything possible!

(fade to various images of people enjoying the Omni-Y experience in previously impossible situations: the subway, a bus ride, a boring class, an argument with spouse/lover/loved one, an emotionally taxing moment in hospital regarding said spouse/lover/loved one, at the funeral, during a shower, while in church, waiting in the grocery line, &c.)

Soon you won’t even need a screen because images will be cast directly onto your retinas! Your ears will be wired for perfect three-dimensional sound! Very small hard-drives will be embedded beneath the skin to store and retrieve your favorite Tee Vee shows, music videos, newspapers and other media. And no one else can see or hear them, nobody but YOU!

Downloads can take place either via a remote device or with an additional implant less than three millimeters in length!

(fade to images of actual implant surgery—go for it, here. We want people to know just how painful and physically obvious the surgery is without going too far and scaring them away. Think lots of zooms and pans, flashing screens of differing colors, crazy music.)

Usually placed near the base of the skull, the Omni-Y INlink keeps you connected while on the go! E-mail, instant messaging, eBay, Porn. Anything you want!

Remember, with the full Omni-Y experience, made by the good people at Sony/CJCLDS Product Corp., ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!

I miss libraries more than anything. Now if I want a book, I have to go buy it. New books suck. Some people like the idea, you know, knowing that you’re the first. But I like something seasoned. You know it when you see a book that’s twenty years old but in perfect shape, it’s most likely a piece of shite. A new book is like a young person; the potential is there, but the odds are it’ll turn out to be a piece of shite.

So now I buy used books, and since there are fewer and fewer used book shops and more conglomerates… well, it just sucks. But is the book industry as corrupt as the music industry, where only the most marketable (or seemingly marketable) are pushed upon the public?

Perhaps. And perhaps I’m just a Bitter Nelly.

In the English Department at the City College of New York (Harlem’s Harvard), one of the hallway doors is semi-permanently propped open with a book jammed between the wall and the door. I won’t tell you the name of the novel, because it might eschew your perception of either the author or the English Department at CCNY. If you really want to know, go there yourself and look.

People dream of fantasy getaways, tropical locales or perhaps the ruins of some other culture as the destinations of their vacations. My perfect vacation involves none of these things but a comfortable chair, a steady supply of coffee and cigarettes (and other addictions), and a stack of fantastic books I’ve never read.

Nothing has helped as much for me in my life, and the understanding of it, than books. And I’ve been to church. I might even venture to say that I consider myself highly spiritual. But the clearest place I’ve ever seen a hint of divinity in the world was in the flashing of mind and imagination brought about by a skilled author massaging the folds of my brain. Perhaps it was phantom and meaningless, but at least it was there.

If you are one of the lucky ones to be able to read and understand words, pick up a book. Any book, even a shitty one. Do not stab anybody, just read it. Let it take you where it will, even if it’s a cul-de-sac of the mind. The next might be even better.