Random
Literature as “What Survives”
In this 2003 interview with Robert Birnbaum, Jane Smiley said:
I am taking a medievalist’s view. That’s what I studied in graduate school. And when you are a medievalist you don’t study what’s good, you study what’s left. And you try to find good things in it. So you come to appreciate every fragment of every bit that’s left. And try to glean something from that fragment, whatever it is.
How does it survive? There are a lot of copies of J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown around. Not so many of Cynthia Ozick and Barry Hannah, relatively speaking. And way fewer of, say, Christine Schutt and Ben Marcus. Are they in physical danger?
There is also the priestly tradition — what gets revived, by whom, and how does it impact future readership or future revivals? (Justin Taylor did Donald Barthelme a huge favor on these grounds, didn’t he?, when he did the McSweeney’s tribute, which in turn contributed to new interest in and new reprintings of Barthelme’s work? Ditto Stewart O’Nan for Richard Yates, and George Pelecanos for Don Carpenter, and the NYRB editors for so many neglected writers. Smiley alludes to these matters in the interview, as well.)
Some say the digitization of things is the salvation of things. Nicholson Baker worries that the destruction of physical copies of, say, newspapers, in favor of virtual modes of storage, is woefully inadequate. Among other reasons: Are you doing well accessing things you once saved on 5 1/4″ disks? Technology changes. Besides, are you more likely to peruse a stack of shelves or wade through digitized information? The search engine is optimized to find specific things. The joy of stumbling onto something adjacent might soon be lost as libraries curtail or cease their physical operations.
Someone will soon argue that there is no such thing as permanence, or that permanence isn’t desirable. I’m very happy to have access to Dante and Chaucer and Shakespeare and the fragments of Sappho. Perhaps you think it’s better that we have only the fragments of Sappho. Would it be better to have none of Sappho?
I want to build a weatherproof, temperature-controlled underground library, and bury it for the archaeologists of the future to find.
TOTALLY
TOTALLY
This is really interesting.
Don’t forget that part of what survives is what people remember, what they memorize because it is so valuable to them. This is the way Akhmatova’s poems survived. This is the way “To Autumn” survives for me–in my heart.
–Joe Ahearn, http://batterrier.com
“something adjacent” — though, as long as there’s a retail portal, there’ll always be a ‘readers who bought this also bought this-‘stuff.
and, yeah, with digitization, your work’s always one delete stroke away, one good virus closer to being gone, but, too, it’s worth it to me, as, once digitized, it can go airborne, ride some radio wave to a whole nother galaxy. I might be a star in the Alpha Centauri system, far as I know. probably I am, I mean. why not? also, with texts going digital, we’re closer to some RANT or FEED model of reading/text ingestion, where it can be piped directly into the thoughtstream somehow. I read INCEPTION and STRANGE DAYS as optimistic, I guess I’m saying. and, keeping them paper, man: all those Mayan codices that loser Bishop Diego del Landes burned in 1562 or whenever? if the Mayans had had flash drives, the world might be a different place now.
I do really like what Smiley’s saying, though. I so wish I could hit more stuff from the Pearl Poet, but’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.
I have no idea how seriously you feel about this apocalibrary, but increasingly it (or something like it) has seemed like a very necessary notion. The last time civilization as we know it collapsed, almost everything vanished in a period of time merely a fraction of the amount it took to accrue it.
We owe what we do have of Aristotle to some anonymous good fellow and pre-modern innovator in the science of temperature-controlled underground libraries; Aristotle in the cave, how the Platonists grinned!
I want to build a weatherproof, temperature-controlled underground library, and bury it for the archaeologists of the future to find.
Let’s do it. Seriously.
[You know, if it’s “underground”, it’s probably “weatherproof” and (somewhat) “temperature-controlled” and certainly ‘buried’, eh? What you want, especially, if it’s full of paper books, is for it to be dry – too dry for microbial munching.]
You can’t beat physics. Those books are toast.
Every time I take books to the second-hand bookstore to sell or give some away, I wonder if they are in fact irreplaceable–who will be able to afford paper books when the digital revolution is complete?
Everything’s toast in the end. Better put some jelly on those books.
[…] t-shirts to better identify readers of like-minded taste! In my web reading this week, I enjoyed this post by Kyle Minor over at HTML Giant. Minor shares his concerns about how, and who, will decide […]
[…] You see how the odds funnel down very, very quickly. It makes you wonder: is literature just what survives? […]
[…] You see how the odds funnel down very, very quickly. It makes you wonder: is literature just what survives? […]