Alan Jacobs

What did Halberstam think he was going to get from Jordan that Jordan hadn’t said a thousand times already? I don’t think there is any way to be interesting once you’ve been asked the same question over and again. The first time your daughter asked you why the stars shine so brightly, I bet you gave some intricate astronomical explanation. The second time, you talked about how they would look even brighter out in the desert, and the third time you said that stars always give 110 percent. It’s human nature.

W. H. Auden used to say that he could only evaluate someone’s thinking — and especially their critical judgments — if he knew what their imaginary Eden looked like. He suggested that everyone fill out the survey below, and indeed filled it out himself. He wrote, for example, that his ideal religion was “Roman Catholic in an easygoing Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints.” He believed that public statues should be “Confined to famous defunct chefs,” and insisted that the only sources of public information should be technical journals and gossip. For self-examination:

• landscape:

• climate:

• ethnic origin of inhabitants:

• language:

• weights & measures:

• religion:

• size of capital:

• form of government:

• sources of natural power:

• economic activities:

• means of transport:

• architecture:

• domestic furniture and equipment:

• formal dress:

• sources of public information:

• public statues:

• public entertainments:

Fidelity matters less for popular music than for books. This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. I was happy with my copy of Abbey Road despite its abysmal sound quality and the fact that - quelle horreur! - I had only recorded one channel of a stereo mix. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 70s, the main way a lot of people listened to music was through crappy a.m. car radios and crappy a.m. transistor radios. And need I mention eight-tracks? The human ear and the human brain seem to be very adept at turning lo-fi music signals into fulfilling listening experiences - the auditory imagination somehow fills in the missing signal. Early MP3s, though they were often ripped at very low bit rates, sounded just fine to the vast majority of the music-listening public, so quality was no barrier to mass piracy. A lo-fi copy of a book, in contrast, is a misery to read. Blurry text, missing pages, clunky navigation: it takes a very dedicated reader to overcome even fairly minor shortcomings in a copy of a book. That’s one of the main reasons that even though bootlegged copies of popular books have been freely available online for quite some time now, few people bother with them.

The overwhelming emphasis on materials and process inherent to fine printing is a tremendous obstacle to the act of reading and the ritual of sitting down to take in a story or poem. Fine press books have ceased to have anything to do with this ritual. In planning these editions, the fine press publisher asks (as Ms Warde noted) How should it look? not What must it do? As a result, the deluxe limited editions are not about content—they are about materials and process. They are exclusively about form, and as such, they are prime examples of function following form: the cardinal sin of design.

If these undeniably beautiful fine press editions, for which every detail is carefully considered and laboriously crafted, is inherently an example of bad design, then what book format can claim to be a successful example of good design? The paperback. The hastily designed, poorly printed, glorified pad of cheap paper is a far more successful piece of design than the fine press book. Although not necessarily handsome, the paperback book can be considered the more beautiful, more successful form because it selflessly gives itself over to the content. Rarely do we concern ourselves with the welfare of our paperbacks.This is because we are too busy reading them. The books are doing their job. Isn’t this the most basic test of successful design, that the object in question is used almost without thought? Is this an attribute the fine press book can claim?

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

thingsmagazine:

Build a paper Volvo 240 (via things)

I’ve got a book coming out called something banal like How To Study Literature because I fear that literary criticism, at least as I knew it and was taught it, is almost as dead on its feet as clog dancing. That is to say, all of the things that I would have been taught at Cambridge—close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness—all of which could have negative corollaries… I just don’t see that any more. Somewhere along the line that sensitivity to language which I value enormously got lost. I didn’t really know about this because I had moved up in the echelons of academia and I wasn’t close enough to the undergraduate ground as it were to be aware of this. But when I got to Manchester [Eagleton began teaching at the University of Manchester in 2001], I was appalled by the way that people could be very smart about the context of a poem, but had no idea about how to talk about it as a poem. Whereas even if one did that badly or indifferently, it was still something one automatically did, in my day. This book coming out next year is really an attempt to put literary criticism as I see it back on the agenda. And to talk about questions of things like value, what’s good, what’s bad, form, theme, language, imagery, and so on.

austinkleon:

Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

A wonderful read about reading. Would make a great companion or gift set bundled with How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

Like a lot of authors, I often hear from readers, “You wrote things that I was already thinking, but put them into words that I couldn’t, or didn’t.” (You must take this as a compliment, not a hint at your lack of originality — writing is an organization of thought, even if those thoughts have already been had.) I’d like to extend the same compliment to Alan, as he further articulated a lot of my own ideas about reading (with a ton of his own!) and dropped a lot of my favorite quotes: Zadie Smith on the joylessness of reading in English departmetns, David Foster Wallace) on the freedom of thought a liberal (and therefore, liberating) education gives you, James Murphy on pretension, Michael Chabon on fan fiction…

Some of those thoughts:

Fuck snobbery. Read what you like.

Read at whim! Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame.

Reading, at its best, is an experience. (Take it slow.)

To paraphrase Lynda Barry, with both reading and writing and drawing, when we’re young we go to the page to have an experience, not to just ingest or disseminate information.

I believe that most people read quickly because they want not to read but to have read. But why do they want to have read? Because, I think, they conceive of reading simply as a means of uploading information to their brains… though few people realize it, many books become more boring the faster you read them.

Writing in your books is a way to make them your own.

And use a pen, not a highlighter:

I am not a fan of the highlighter. Highlighters allow you very quickly and easily to mark a text, but only by covering it with a bright color; and the very quickness and easiness of the process are inimical to the kind of responsiveness I’m recommending… With a highlighter you can have a text marked before you’ve even had time to ask yourself why you’re marking it

Imitation can push into emulation and pretension can lead to understanding.

Young people often signal through their pretensions what they hope to become… They see people whom they admire, or are in some way attracted to, and they try to copy the preferences of those paragons. Such copying can lead to more and more pretension; but in many cases the pretense becomes real: the tastes we aspire to often become our own tastes.

When you read an author you love, climb their family tree.

We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them. After all, Austen became the Austen we know largely through her reading—something that is true of almost all writers… If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits…

Sometimes it’s not the book, but the book that book leads you to.

[T]he best of all results when one is swimming up the literary stream [is] to find writers and works you love even more than the ones that prompted your adventure.

Reading books doesn’t automatically make you a better person.

(This is something you learn from your interactions with many English professors and library patrons.)

As the eighteenth-century scientist G.C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

The thinking is that even if kids read garbage, they’ll eventually make their way to the good stuff, but:

Why is it that when kids become enraptured by some idiotic program, no one says, ‘Well, at least they’re watching TV?’ ”

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Thanks to Frank for the recommendation.

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Twilight is a book that has been written dozens of times before. It’s part of a great tradition of American writing, the rangy, pop diagnostic manual of Our Current Predicament. These are books of lofty, multidisciplinary ambition that are meant to theorize the tectonic shifts underfoot for as many readers as possible. Their measure isn’t whether they’re right or wrong, but whether they begin to successfully colonize the way their readers decode everyday life. Their observations begin to seem intuitive and obvious. Everything seems like a bogus publicity stunt after you read Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, for example, just as Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism makes you notice just how needy and coddled everyone else is. (Not you, of course. Everyone else.)

Jonathan Puckey’s Typographic Rhythm idea is cool, but I think it ought to work exactly the opposite of the way it does: the faster you type the dimmer your text should get; only slow typing, the kind of typing done when you’re really thinking about what you want to say, should be black.