Bookstores are a place where people go not just to find a new book or an old book, but to have a fundamental conversation with themselves about who they are and who they aspire to be.
—Jim Mustich ‘77, Editor-in-Chief of the Barnes & Noble Review, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly’s “The New Tastemakers”
Old men cross the road in front of you on foot, behind flocks of newly shorn sheep, taking their time, stopping to wave the fat lambs over, or to take off their shoes and look for bits of gravel that have been bothering them for hours. The fact that you are in a hurry is of no particular interest to them; in their opinion, if you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly.
I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
—Orhan Pamuk, in his speech accepting the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature
I am an unashamed, unapologetic believer that the purpose of literature is to elevate. Not to entertain, to problematize, or to instruct, but to take what Hamlet called our “unweeded garden” and revel in its thorns. Not to make the world pretty, but to make it true, and by making it true, make it beautiful. All real art is high art.
This year I want to figure out why, when an author says the phrase “working on a story collection” (as in “I’m working on a story collection”), everyone in publishing reacts as if they have instead heard the phrase “molesting several children.”
—James Hannaham in Jacket Copy’s “25 Literary Resolutions for 2012”
This bookshelf is awesome beyond words.
Good sentences, the ebullient critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed wrote in 1990, are sent into the air like a series of jazz licks.“You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.”
—Dwight Garner, in The New York Times Magazine’s year-end feature The Lives They Lived
‘Authorship’ — in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity — was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like ‘jottings’ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost.
The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public — a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright — ‘the exclusive right to reproduce, public, and sell the matter and form of a literary of artistic work’ — was born.
Xerography — every man’s brain-picker — heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one — instant steal!
As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.” Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1967. Pp 122-23.
“Culture, at a least a compelling one, develops when people are collectively engaged with a whole range of books, authors, artists, musicians, television shows, theater, magazines, etc. We would not consider an artistically robust culture to be one where everyone had been exposed to Matisse and Dali but no one else. The same is true of a literary culture: to have a good one, it is vital that a whole lot of people are reading, being exposed to, picking up, talking about, considering, engaging with, and blogging on a whole lot of books. In other words, more is more. In fact, more is critical.”
—Rachel Meier, writing in The Christian Science Monitor
