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Meanland Extract: Bookless shelves and ‘Myspace or whatever’

Clare Strahan September 08

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day.

Richard Nash described print-books as ‘talismanic things’ that were passed between loved ones with the same emotional sensibility and heirloom potential as ‘a piece of jewellery’. He said, ‘Bookshelves are a kind of way of telegraphing to a person that comes in our front door for the first time, who we are.’

Zoe Dattner asserted that it’s the stories that matter, not the books themselves. In the ebook/e-reader future: ‘Bookshelves will just be called shelves and we’ll put all sorts of stuff on there so when we go to people’s houses we’ll still do that stuff – or their Myspace page or whatever – there will be lots of spaces where we can display that kind of personal expression of ourselves …’

Ah Zoe, you break my heart.

The book, the old fashioned print-book, is not a download. It’s not words on a screen. I have nothing against online publishing. Look, here I am, publishing online. I love the Internet. But the online book and e-reader type device is not a print-book; they are different beasts and I think it’s a kind of tragedy to imagine, as Zoe suggests, that there’s no need for both. Why does electronic technology have to obliterate the material, papery, dog-eared artefact? I agree with Richard Nash. The artefact of the book has a meaning, it is a jewel.

Imagine this: I’m 20-something and standing in front of the bookshelf explaining to my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend that the difference between he and I, is ‘all these books, all these books are inside me, they’ve informed me, shaped my thinking either by osmosis or rejection or examination or some kind of tunnel I’ve been through. An initiation. And not just the words but the circumstances around the words – everything I brought to the words at the time. All these books are places I’ve been without you – and they matter.’


Read the rest of this post over at Meanland.


 

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