Alan Jacobs

That being said, I can only confess to being repeatedly humbled and reconverted by Lewis in a way that is true of few other modern Christian writers. Re-reading works I have not looked at for some time, I realize where a good many of my favorite themes and insights came from, and am constantly struck by the richness of imagination and penetration that can be contained even in a relatively brief letter. Here is someone you do not quickly come to the end of — as a complex personality and as a writer and thinker.

Rowan Williams on C S Lewis. I resonate with this very strongly. Lewis was fairly important to me when I was a young Christian, but not nearly as important as several other figures, and for many years I largely ignored him. Only when I was asked to write a biography of Lewis did I confront the uncomfortable fact that I was keeping Lewis at arm’s length not because of any of his own failings, but because I was tired of dealing with vast hordes of evangelicals for whom whatever CSL said about anything was the last word on that topic. It wasn’t Jack that I was tired of, but Jackolatry. When I had to read everything that he wrote in preparation for writing the biography — no small task, let me tell you — I was forced to see that his was a far more copious and supple mind than I had ever realized. Like Archbishop Rowan, I occasionally had the uncomfortable experience of finding in Lewis the source of some idea that I had believed to be my own, and further had believed to be very up-to-date, responsive to the moment — not the sort of thing that would ever have occurred to an old dinosaur like CSL. Those were telling moments.

We have three minds, I reckon, one of which is the body, while the other two are forms of mentation: daylight consciousness and dreaming consciousness. If one of these is absent from a work, it isn’t complete; and if one or two of them are suppressed, kept out of sight, then the whole thing—whatever it is you’ve created—is in bad faith. Thinking in a fusion of our three minds is how humans do naturally think, at any level above the trivial. The questions to ask of any creation are: What’s the dream dimension in this? How good is the forebrain thinking, but also how good is the dream here? Where’s the dance in it, and how good is that? How well integrated are all three; or if there is dissonance, is that productive? And, finally, what larger poem is this one in? Who or what does it honor? Who does it want to kill?

After all, the relationship between human reader and “animated” book has been forged over centuries. The Bible, perhaps the first book to be characterized in these terms, was thought to be the material embodiment of Jesus Christ, “a living and breathing likeness of Him” in the words of Erasmus. Since Christ was understood to be the carnal manifestation of the Scriptures — the Word made flesh, according to the literary scholar James Kearney — the Bible was reflexively endowed with human properties. “The leaves of this booke be the armes, the handes, legges and feete” of Christ, said Bishop John Fisher in an early-16th-century sermon. The capital letters dyed in red are “the great wounds of his body, in his handes, and in his feete, and in his side.”

The press loves inspirational stories about Kindle prospectors like Hocking or crime writer John Locke striking it rich, but unfortunately this has fostered a bonanza mentality around the subject of self-published e-books (even among people who have no intention of actually writing the “books” they plan to sell). This is what Morrison means when he writes, “I’m convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble.” E-books, of course, are here to stay. Many, many readers love them, or at least find them addictively convenient. But the delusion that a writer can come out of nowhere and use assorted social networking tools to engineer a bestseller overnight is untenable.

It’s untenable not because it hasn’t happened at least once or twice among the 1.1 million Kindle authors, but because readers aren’t cattle to be milked. They’re human beings who do writers the great favor of spending their time and attention (and sometimes their money) on authors’ work. Their good faith, once lost, is unlikely to return. They’ve become leery of the glut of off-brand e-books being peddled to them by retailers and of incessant Facebook and Twitter pitches from people they barely (or don’t even know). Most of them still believe that the fellow readers who recommend books to them online are sincere and actually exist, but how much longer can that last?

Consumerism now wants you to be single, so it sells this as sexy. The irony is that it’s now more radical to attempt to be in a long-term relationship and a long-term job, to plan for the future, maybe even to attempt to have children, than it is to be single. Coupledom, and long-term connections with others in a community, now seem the only radical alternative to the forces that will reduce us to isolated, alienated nomads, seeking ever more temporary ‘quick fix’ connections with bodies who carry within them their own built-in perceived obsolescence.

The solution: Get radical, get hitched, demand commitment from partners and employers. Say no to the seductions of the disposable singles market.

Readers would be rightly insulted if they felt I’d assumed they were less smart or less sophisticated than I am. That would be unbearably condescending. And anyway they like some puzzlement, some baroque, perhaps, and certainly some material that doesn’t release all its savor at a first lick. Really, writers and readers alike, as you know, we work beyond our own intelligence; necessarily so. That’s the raison d’etre, the road to the trance that art exists to provide. The significances in a poem ought to be latent as well as patent: You find them as a matter of pleasure as you are reading; you don’t need a critic to tell them to you.

Saturday, July 28, was the final day of a remarkable three-day process to reinvent Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif. Some 80 booksellers, community leaders, publishers, authors and customers sat in a large conference room in the Oshman Family JCC, buzzing with new determination — even a touch of anger.

Armed with dozens of strips of paper, masking tape and glue sticks, the participants quickly distilled their previous 14 hours of discussion to eight foundational principles and activities. The new Kepler’s Books must:

1. Be financially sustainable.

2. Have a clearly defined mission.

3. Be dedicated to community outreach.

4. Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events.

5. Support life-long learning and literary education.

6. Sell books in any form, on any platform.

7. Maintain a virtual presence, with technology fully integrated into the store.

8. Provide a carefully curated selection of books.

I have plenty of friends in and from California, but I don’t think California is fundamentally a friendly place. It’s open – it’s easy to become part of the community (inasmuch as there is a community), much easier than in New England or, I suspect, the South – but that’s not the same thing as friendly.

Now New York, my hometown, that’s a friendly place. And open – it’s relatively easy to join the community, and there is a community. We’re certainly not polite – we’re frankly rude – but we’re open and friendly.

Four dichotomies:

Open versus Closed: how easy is it to join the community?

Friendly versus Cold: is the community mutually supportive and warm to outsiders, or the opposite?

Tolerant versus Conformist: does the community expect everyone to be the same, or can you fly your freak flag with relative impunity?

Polite versus Rude: does the community enforce codes of deference, courtesy and respect, or is socially abrasive behavior the norm?

I would call New York Open, Friendly (more friendly than people think), Tolerant (but not as tolerant as people think) and Rude. I am not as familiar with the South, but from my experience and from what I hear, I’d call it Closed, Friendly, Tolerant and Polite. California I’d call Open, Cold, Tolerant and Rude.

Old Swiss farmhouse-turned-office

That said, many of these film adaptations have something in common—they’re based not on full-length novels but on short stories or novellas, which give the director and his or her screenwriters the chance to expand and elaborate, rather than condense and truncate, the literary source. “Benjamin Button” takes a bare-bones story with a surprising span and locates the grand historical fresco it implies; whereas, when filming “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Fincher was obviously limited by the literal storytelling that the familiar novel dictated (and he did well to make his illustrations so mercurial). Writing here recently about Hawks’s “To Have and Have Not,” I noted the ruthless extraction and abstraction to which he submitted Hemingway’s novel in order to make a good movie from it.