The Tragedy of the Modern Library

I try to listen to A Prairie Home Companion each Saturday evening, in large part because, despite being politically and socially liberal, I am personally quite conservative and prone to nostalgia and wistfulness for a purer experience of things that it seems I was denied by the unrelenting progress of history. This week’s broadcast featured an episode in the adventures of Ruth Harrison, reference librarian, a character who is rather similar in that regard. She is educated, non-combative, socially permissive, but often silently critical of people’s tastes and a widespread loss of noble ideals.

In this latest episode she editorialized for a moment in conversation with her twenty-eight year-old intern, Trent (not the other one, Brent, who is thirty-seven) after he had helped a patron find a thriller that showcased truly heinous crimes. Miss Harrison, voiced by the highly talented Sue Scott, commented: “In library school we were taught that the role of the library is to educate, to uplift, not to cater to every whim.” I didn’t even go to library school, but I have always had the same image of libraries.

On hearing that line of dialogue, I thought of the last couple of trips I have taken to the Central Library in the City of Buffalo. It has come a long way from the libraries that were so domestically familiar to me throughout elementary and high school. These days, when you walk around a library, you find that the stacks are deserted but that a sea of people stretches throughout the computer banks. On an occasion when I lost my internet connection, I had to carry my laptop to the library in order to borrow its wireless connection for a day. Doing so made me feel sort of cheap and disloyal, and it also gave me an opportunity to occasionally observe the behavior of the other patrons, which in turn made me feel worse.

I noticed a middle aged couple sharing a long game of solitaire on one computer. Elsewhere, a man about my age was watching Youtube. My eyes have passed over various computer screens each time I’ve been back there, and I find that these are extremely commonplace activities. Many different kinds of games are played in the Buffalo library – first-person shooters, adventure games, bejeweled and similar puzzles. A significant portion of the library patronage these days, perhaps the majority, is evidently poor people who have no access to such entertainment at home and utilize the library for the idle passage of time instead.

Oh, to be poor but also have such free time or the means of transportation to frequent the region’s most expansive library! I understand not reading because you simply don’t have the time amidst your exhausting and low-paying work, and I understand having little access to either books or technology, particularly in a town where everything is so spread-out. But here the people I’ve seen at the library have the opportunity to beautifully enrich their lives with the information and artistry that surrounds them in a variety of media, and they choose to play dull games. It is a tragedy that libraries are used this way, that they are little more than the low-rent internet cafes and LAN parties of the twenty-first century.

Even if people ventured away from the computers, I find that the most prominently featured books aren’t all that much better. I want to believe that there are a few librarians who work in that building and react to the public much as does Ruth Harrison, diligently pointing them towards the popular fiction with easily digestible plots and few themes, then lamenting that she could have recommended Hemmingway or Faulkner. I’ve found that those sorts of lamentations often meet with comments along the lines of, “Hey, anything that gets kids reading.” That’s not the least bit persuasive to me. The mere act of allowing one’s brain to process typewritten words doesn’t in and of itself make for a richer intellectual experience than other alternatives. Is a child really better off reading Stephanie Meyer or Dan Brown than watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on DVD or listening closely to a Brahms symphony?

The sentiment of “as long as they’re reading” speaks to what I think is the underlying misconception that drives the degradation of libraries and of collective appreciation of art and literature. It also speaks to the difficulty that we face in reversing the trend. I resent what libraries have become, but I see no way of changing them back into grand temples of information and culture. In order to draw in the public and avoid closure, they have to provide the type of access that people want. And as a matter of principle, anything that qualifies as information or culture should have a place there, regardless of its intrinsic quality. So it’s not as if there is any cause for libraries to restrict people from being able to use them in such frivolous ways. But so long as easy escapism can be found there, the public will surely continue to gravitate toward it.

We need a collective breaking point to overturn the misconception, which drives both trends, that a greater quantity of information is effectively the same as a greater quality. I’m inclined to think that libraries think they are providing an adequate public service and that the public thinks it is adequately utilizing that service simply because, between the books and the high-speed internet, there’s a lot of information that’s directly accessible to the entire public. It doesn’t seem to matter how it’s utilized. But the danger to libraries is the danger to all of society – that as everything comes to be more and more at our fingertips, we will grow increasingly complacent about it and let the petty distractions dominate our attention. Since everything else is still there, such allowances seem to come at the expense of nothing, but in fact they come at the expense of our very minds.

The Personality of Mental Illness

On Monday’s Colbert Report, the guest was Nassir Ghaemi, who has written a book called “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness.” In the interview he explained that certain mental illnesses can have positive effects, such as mania contributing to intense creativity and depression being associated with greater empathy. I was thrilled to hear such an idea uttered on television, because it represents an almost unheard of push towards mainstream recognition of views similar to my own on mental abnormality, psychiatric medication, and over-diagnosis of mental illness.

I feel that Americans are far too quick to see themselves as afflicted by mental states and psychological tendencies, when they might be better served by identifying themselves as being simply influenced by those things. It suggests a terrible pessimism, and a pessimism that ironically is grounded in a preoccupation with happiness. It seems to me that people look on their own abnormalities through a negative filter, noticing only the extent to which it impedes a sense of pleasure and one’s capability for thorough social assimilation.

I’m certainly willing to acknowledge that there are mental afflictions that seriously threaten a person’s life or well-being, and to which medication may be a reasonable response, but I believe that in the vast majority of cases, the impulse towards diagnosis and treatment is based on an unanalyzed desire for normality, and that this ignores the possibility of negative effects from artificially altering one’s own brain chemistry. The essence of my view is that it is extremely difficult to disembed who you are from how your mind works. My personal feeling is that no matter how serious a diagnosis I could secure for any damaging tendencies or dark thoughts that I experienced, I would never appeal to medication or even to elaborate therapies as a means of contending with them. My worry is that by making a top priority of removing the abnormality, people effectively risk using a machete to remove a tumor. Something is likely to be lost that you weren’t aiming for. Is it worthwhile to induce changes in your personality for the sake of improving your sense of comfort? Some may well say yes, but I imagine that most people to whom the question is relevant simply don’t think about it.

For my part, I think that being prone to what one could call depression is part of who I am. By definition, I guess that means that I’m not a happy person, and that I don’t have much hope of being one unless I experience some very significant changes. I can be content with that, however, because I highly value other things apart from happiness. I also believe that without my depression, I likely would not be nearly as principled a person as I am, or precisely as Ghaemi points out, as empathetic. The worst of my depression can sap my motivation, but the best of it gives me a clearer picture of what a kinder loving world would look like. I can’t fathom the idea of reverse-engineering a part of my brain so as to be able to operate more easily and more regularly in pursuit of much less significant goals.

Perhaps this commentary will be viewed as unfair because I am generalizing my ordinary experience of downcast moods and deleterious attributes, and pronouncing upon mental illness, which may be quite different, and inconceivable to me. But who, apart from a psychologist is to say that I’m not mentally ill? And even if one psychologist denies that description, I expect I’d be able to find another willing to levy a diagnosis. A great portion of the problem with this subject, to my mind, is that there is no clarity as to where the dividing line lies. I’ve always thought of the selective diagnosis of bipolar disorder as rather unfair. Defined in its most general possible terms as the vacillation between exhilarating highs and debilitating lows, manic depression just strikes me as a symptom of being alive. There are no doubt some people who barely experience those highs and lows at all, and others who are unambiguously bipolar and feel utterly out of control because of the strength and frequency of the phases, but there must be vast swaths of the population who exist somewhere in the middle ground, where those phases occur and have a recognizable effect, but don’t necessarily dominant the individual’s personality. Clinically, some of those people will end up with a diagnosis of the illness, and others will not. I surmise that that must harm the self-perception of individuals who end up on both sides of the arbitrary divide. Those who are denied a diagnosis are left with the impression that what they experience is a set of personal features that are under their control, which they can alter or overturn by their own efforts. The ones that are identified as bipolar, on the other hand, are made to think that they are sick and that their own efforts are futile without external treatment.

As I see it, the truth is both that all of us and none of us are in control of our own minds. Our own behavior can reinforce itself or contradict itself, and reason can isolate problems that need to change even within our own thinking, but our activity and our brain chemistry also have innumerable external influences, which similarly affect realization, reinforcement, and reversal. The nexus of internal and external influences provides the potential for constant change. Sometimes that change may be regressive, and sometimes it may be insubstantial, but under ordinary circumstances it can at least be assumed that it is gradual. And that fact affords people the possibility of measured change, in contrast to the option of cutting off the source of discomfort and sacrificing whatever may go with it.

Mental illness is a frightening topic. But what is far more frightening to me is the notion that such large numbers of Americans are more concerned with being normal than they are with being themselves. Mental illness and personality traits may sometimes be the same features in different degrees, and they may be inextricably linked together. I think there is too much guess work and too much alarmism involved for it to be worth playing with the fabric of one’s mind, but I am decidedly in the minority within a culture that so values the kind of happiness that is best obtained by blending in and accommodating the circumstances rather than changing them. In that context, it will be a long time before enough people change their views to reach the breaking point wherein, as Ghaemi says, we are able to, “in a matter-of-fact way, accept that some abnormality is actually quite good.”

Borders Bookstores: Murdered!

I expect to actually mourn the loss of Borders. For me, it’s like losing a long-time neighbor with whom you had always exchanged pleasant greetings, and whom you assumed you would have ample opportunity to get to know better. It’s also kind of like practically everyone else in my neighborhood inattentively pitched burning trash into his yard until he died of smoke inhalation. That assessment might suggest to you that I’m in the anger phase.

I don’t think I’m going to go through all the stages of the Kubler-Ross model. I’m at a stage of my life wherein I can’t imagine myself entertaining all five of those responses to any personal loss of tragedy, whether it’s the death of a loved one or the closure of a media store in which I wish I’d had the chance to spend more time. There are only two alternatives for me right now, and I kind of like it that way. That which I cannot accept makes me angry, and I’ll remain angry as long as my spirit will allow. I have too strong an ideological commitment to the notion of remaining vigilantly aware of what I consider to be wrong to ever allow myself the indulgence of denial. I’m too proud and solitary to see the appeal of bargaining. And depression… well sure, most things can depress me, but that and anger are almost never mutually exclusive.

I’m going to stay angry about this until people seem to widely understand what we’re losing, and how culpable they are for it. Every literate person with an e-book reader is complicit in the murder both of small bookstores and the big-box retailers like the dearly departed Borders. I am and will remain angry at everyone whose obsession with the latest gadgets and status symbols overrides their perception of benefit in having community spaces where people who appreciate the same things can appreciate them in kind, and where people can actively discover new ideas.

I’m terrified that someday there won’t be anywhere left for me to go to leaf through the pages of a book with an interesting title, attractive cover, and appropriate thickness, or to run my finger over a chosen shelf to find a topic at random. Why does no one else seem angry about this? Why is there no public sense that gaining in convenience can bring about the loss of something else that’s equally or more desirable?

I’m losing a neighbor that I really wanted to know better, for love of the few splendid memories we have. He’s been killed now by so many misguided hands, and wounded in so many places. Most everywhere I’ve travelled there’s been a Borders bookstore, and now it will be torn from the entire landscape of the country, wounded in every place by people who wield their e-book readers like knives concealed in cowardice beneath the robes they wear for a ceremony of shallow literacy.

I cannot accept plots to murder the printed word in sacred space, so I mourn in anger against these conspirators.

The Lesser Value of Fiction

Laura Miller recently wrote a piece in response to the author Phillip Roth stating that he has stopped reading fiction. Miller points out that other authors have said the same in previous years, among them William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, and Will Self. She offers an interesting assessment of the motivations that might lay behind this, albeit an incomplete one. To my mind, the most significant observation was this comparison of nonfiction and fiction, and of how the reader interacts with them:

“As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn't offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.”

Not being a literary critic myself, I can’t write competently about what might be people’s general motivations for reading one thing as opposed to another, or about the observed merits of various genres and different types of authors. I can only speak to my personal assessment of the value of different kinds of writing, a perspective that comes less from my observations of what I read than from my observations of what I write.

As my financial situation has gotten increasingly dire, and my job prospects have proven themselves to be nil, my ambition to write has never waned very much. However, it swiftly became apparent to me that if I intended to make any money off of my passion, I would probably have to focus more on writing fiction than I had before. Indeed, it seemed to me that if I wanted to keep my passion alive at all, I’d need to focus on fiction, because a hopeless outlook on my own life sapped me of the motivation to do otherwise.

This reorganization of my priorities was a definite problem, though, because I began trying to write fiction knowing that my heart wasn’t in it. Although it’s more accurate to say that my heart’s not in the writing of realistic fiction. I do, however, have a special interest in speculative fiction, and I can write it with conviction and aplomb much the same way that I can write editorial content and, when I have the inspiration for it, creative non-fiction. But I have never really seen enough value in literary realism to pour my creativity into it. My feeling is that if I am going to write something that’s grounded in my imagination, it ought to be something that is beyond the limits of ordinary experience – something that allows people to understand their world and themselves by bringing their mundane understanding to bear on fantastic worlds and experiences unlike our own. And if I’m going to write something realistic, why not write something that is actually real?

When Miller writes that fiction offers an experience rather than information or instruction, she makes a meaningful point, but she implies that non-fiction, by contrast, doesn’t offer experience. And that is not strictly true. Creative nonfiction can very poignantly present both elements to the reader, providing clear, confirmable information, but putting it into the context of vividly described experiences that surround that base of knowledge. One of the most trite pieces of advice given to aspiring writers, often by people who do not write, is “write what you know.” Trite though it may be, that advice does strike me as sound and perhaps obvious. If you don’t know what you’re writing about, you’re just making things up and risking information. As an adolescent, my aspirations to become a better writer entailed not rigorously exercising my imagination, but increasing the range of things that I knew. In what might be an ironic testament to my lack of imagination, my life since then has been much more isolated and monotonous than I ever thought possible, and I am tragically unwilling to write about China or Iowa because I have never been to either, or about logging or yachting because I have neither done nor witnessed those things. It may be hideously limiting and self-defeating, but as far as I’m concerned, I have no business writing about things that I haven’t seen first-hand but theoretically could.

I make no judgments about what other people write, but my personal standards do extend into what I read and how I appreciate the things that I read. I have encountered some moving, powerful fictional stories, but I often come away from them with a certain conflicted feeling that I do not have when I read speculative fiction, creative nonfiction, or straightforward nonfiction. I read a splendidly written story in a recent New Yorker about a woman’s experience of becoming homeless. It was a good story, it spoke to me, and it seemed distinctly plausible. But that last point distracted me at some point as I was reading it. There is something about reading a story that seems real but isn’t that can be somewhat disturbing to me. Here I was vicariously experiencing somebody’s misfortune and misery, striving to empathize with it and learn from it, and it wasn’t real. Yet at the same time, thousands of real people were experiencing the same basic experiences, and the opportunity was there for the author to write about something real with the same vividness and narrative strength, through which to present even more meaningful themes – more meaningful because they would have been real.

I think the same impulse explains my tendency to remain disinterested in contemporary novels, always focusing instead on brushing up on the classics. Such books might be fabrications of perfectly ordinary events, but at least they describe a time and place that I cannot experience for myself. But when the stories come from my world, from early twenty-first century America, I am not much driven to read them. I would much rather go out into that world and bear witness to the true stories being crafted within it, with all their literary quality. And if I can ever get out of the circumstance of just barely eking out a living in Buffalo, NY, those are the stories that I, as a writer, want to tell.

A Sense of Place

There was a nice slideshow on Salon yesterday, naming some of the most beautiful and distinctive bookstores in the world, which, the author said, would “make you rethink your Kindle.”

I don’t think the average Kindle owner thought about it in the first place. I get the impression that the e-book reader phenomenon is driven primarily by an unmitigated and all but universal fervor for technology. If it’s identified as new and innovative, it seems as though people will stand in line to get one, even if they never considered whether they wanted it or needed it.

But the higher tech option is not always the best option, and I wish I could push American society to the breaking point of realizing that fact once and for all. Sometimes the traditional alternative provides an appeal that is different from the appeal of modernity, but one that is still distinct and meaningful. The Salon piece suggests one such appeal that should be obvious, but that I think is often overlooked even by the defenders of analog: the beauty of actually buying something from a physical space.

I’m not at all a shopper, but when I do wish to acquire something, nothing pleases me more than holding it in my hands before it is really mine to possess. I love to flip through copious stacks of records and find the ones that most appeal to me, and I love to leaf through physically real books, to be able to pick things up at random and hold them side-by-side.

If there’s one thing that technology cannot satisfyingly replace, I would say that thing may be the thrill of discovery. I honestly can't understand why this doesn’t occur to other people. Convenience is not always an improvement. There is a point at which convenience steals away the features that made an activity what it was. And in the case of books, tactile sensation and dog-earing pages and marginalia all aside, part of the experience of literature – indeed, of virtually anything – is its physicality, the sense that there is a place where the literate gather, a shared visual representation of the enormity of what the intellectually curious are vainly striving to grasp.

Sometimes, as the Salon slideshow points out to us, that physical space may be a repurposed cathedral or theater, a site standing as a lovely monument in some distant place, or hidden somewhere inside the daily experiences of our landscape. Sometimes, bookstores are really beautiful. And to my mind, losing bookstores, or record stores, or any of the other places that lend a sense of community, sacrifice, and engagement to our acts of acquisition is bad enough if those places are banal. It is worse when the experience that’s lost is not only meaningful and affective, but powerfully unique.