What’s love got to do with it? Actually, nothing
Maybe the real reason I want print to be dead is so we can stop reading awful puff pieces like Rachel Donadio’s essay that appeared in The New York Times Book Review over the weekend. Entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books,” it was yet another silly think-piece about how you can’t judge a book by its cover, but plenty of people judge prospective lovers by the books that they read (or don’t read). And I don’t really have a fault with the essay’s thesis, since it’s indeed mostly true (in high school we used to joke about a girl who thought that Daniel Defoe was Willem’s brother), but the problem is that this same phenomenon occurs with just about every other form of art as well. For instance, in the world of music snobs there are guys who won’t date girls who think that Captain Beefhart was someone in the army, while film snobs will shun anyone who hasn’t heard of Cahiers du cinema (let alone some of the famous directors who once wrote for it). So while people who love books can continue to feel that theirs is the greatest love of all, potential suitors all over the world are in fact being spurned for all kinds of reasons. In fact, in NYU dorm rooms right now there are probably a whole lot more guys who are turned off because a girl has a Zune and not an iPod rather than the fact that she reads Tom Wolfe instead of Thomas. Because of this, increasingly, books are not what we talk about when we talk about love; they’re simply what we talk about when we talk about books.
3 Comments so far
Leave a reply
This article was close to making an interesting point, but it was lost in the fruitless attempt to prove that books can make you fall in or out of love. That’s silly.
The underlying idea here is books as performance and ritual, and books as an extension of personality. Just as a MySpace profile is a collage meant to represent a person’s identity through various media modules, a bookshelf (or CD shelf, or art collection) also serves a similar purpose. There’s a live performance going on every time you examine a friend or lover’s bookshelf. The same type of performance happens on the subway from Park Slope every morning as each rider looks around at what his companions are wearing, carrying, and of course, reading.
While students in NYU dorm rooms are likely looking at one another’s mp3 player, they are also judging each other by what music they actually put on when entertaining. Similarly, they are understanding one another through the books they are reading. They are decoding the symbolic language of one another - what does it mean that this person has a Tim Robbins novel in concordance with Converse sneakers, a Beastie Boys poster, and a Grateful Dead CD?
The book in its traditional form is a piece that helps to build the identity of a person, and the performance can’t take place as it has for decades when the books are in digital files on an e-book reader. The sns profile will slither in to package and display a person’s media preferences the way their home and personal space did in decades past. This type of performance will die if (when?) print dies and I, for one, will miss it.
So true — another truly stupid culture piece from the Times. I was embarrassed to find myself reading it.
The carefully placed tome poking out of a pocket was a favourite fashion accessory of mine in my teenage years. I think I may even have used The Stranger on occasion although obviously in the original French, L’Etrange.