Archive for August 30th, 2009
I am now a southerner–and a bibliophobe
With the removal of my old license plates I have joined my brother among southerners. The nearby diner I visited a couple of weeks ago served grits. The recent weather has been rainy with the remnants of a hurricane. I love the magnolia trees here.
Nevertheless, natives tell me that being so close to Washington DC taints the southernness. “Yeah, south of Richmond is the real south.” I don’t know. I bet I could find people from Raleigh, Atlanta or Biloxi who consider all of Virginia marginally southern. On the other hand, when I visited Alaska, they lumped us all into “the lower forty-eight”.
This afternoon I happened by a big bookstore. I used to love bookstores. But recently I have been reluctant to buy books. In moving, I gave away boxes and boxes of books. Boxes and more boxes. Lots of books from my office. Forgotten books I found in the attic. Books from the garage. I utterly recycled a long shelf of old computer books. Technology books quickly decay from useful to sometimes useful to wrong. Sometime about the twentieth boxload of books, I resolved to get what I needed from libraries or online if possible.
However, I had a gift card to this bookstore chain. It was going to expire in a few months. So I bought a few books, some as gifts.
The bookstore had huge remainders bins. Though part of me is thrilled to buy knowledge by the pound, there is something melancholy about a year of work–plus editing!–selling for a quarter. Last year at the university, a professor’s office on my hallway was cleaned. The fellow tenured to that great campus in the sky. His family and colleagues each selected an item or two to preserve, mostly for sentimental reasons. Then two men needed two hours to haul a wall full of books and journals and four filing cabinets of papers to the recycling bin. A lifetime of medical research went to the dumpster.
In that frame of mind, I sought titles of enduring value. I visited the religion section. Hmm. Christianity for Dummies. Revelation for Dummies. Philosophy for Dummies. I admire these kinds of books for their consistent structure, consistent attention to common difficulties, and consistent if corny humor. I have Virtualization for Dummies on my work desk. I have never seen a Dentistry for Dummies.
The bookstore was huge. Though classics certainly were available, most items were recently published. There exist ideas, feelings, eras, places and lives that can be expressed best by a long novel. That said, samples suggested that the bulk of fiction books at this store could be reduced to a sentence each, if that much. Fluff can have entertainment value, but I could not find much of even that. Ditto for self-help books. On the other hand, I found the biography and history sections intimidating. Where to begin? While I am confident good info is increasing, there’s every prospect that my remaining time and brain cells could be completely absorbed by irrelevancy. So I’ve taken to consulting reviews and colleagues much more than I used to. I miss that independence.
I hope to recover my love for books. I have a card for the local library system. In a few weeks I aim to start visiting the Library of Congress and other such landmarks.
Perhaps someday we each will have a personalized searcher/summarizer, sort of like Google Alerts plus SparkNotes but beyond news to most words ever written. The expansion of knowledge makes such a tool needful. I usually see a Kindle or two when riding the Metro. I thought about getting a Kindle particularly for the tech manauls, but I don’t plan on buying that many books. Of course I don’t trust whatever controls what goes into the brain any more than I trust whatever controls what goes into the mouth.
Washington has many stories about the quality of information–and of the quality of the information provider and the information consumer. I knew a history teacher who warned his students to use Wikipedia only to help find references, not as a source. To make his point, after giving an assignment, he updated the most likely Wikipedia article with grotesquely bogus information. He reverted his own update the next morning. Yep, he caught ‘em.
