literature, consumption, john updike, and class: lessons learned from city streets
so, the printers row book fair graced the expansion of dearborn this weekend, much to my delight.
i love books. love reading them. love holding them. love making them. sadly, love owning them, and consequently, buying them.
and one thing i noticed while walking home from the park on saturday via the fair grounds back to my humble temporary home, was how the vendors were storing things for the night: the books were bundled up and covered with nothing more than plastic tarps, sometimes just plastic trash bags, rope, and duct tape. the books weren't locked up, and it looked perfectly feasible for anyone who wanted to, to steal these books in the night. there were no cops around. and plastic and rope are easy to get through. hell, you could even reach under and into the plastic and just have your pick of all the literature left there in the street.
i've seen people's bag lunches at work more well-protected than that.
of course, it had occured to me that i could go back in the night and take whatever i wanted (i had, afterall, just spent about $100 on books that afternoon, and was feeling the dent already), but i would never do it. but i thot to myself, how easy it would be. you could walk away with a lot of $'s worth of literature in one fell swoop.
so why weren't these vendors concerned?
i thought about how few homeless people i saw at the fair all day, even tho there were food vendors abound and pockets aplenty to be picked (that's horrible of me, i kno).
then, it dawned on me: no one who would normally steal would steal a book. that is, (and i am assuming a lot here, obviously), persons who would steal, or rather, those who would need to steal (the homeless, the extremely poor) would have no need to steal a book. what are the homeless to do with literature, when they don't have homes to read them in, no leisure time to devote to what might seem a trivial indulgence? to be able to buy a book and read it is truly a privelege of the rich and well-to-do, the intellectual elite, who can nourish their minds in addition to their bodies, when others struggle to do barely do the latter in this country.
a book, as wonderful as it is to me, is truly a worthless object. it's the ideas that are valuable, but the material object is exactly that, a physical residue of that which you absorb, a vessel which can be discarded like a wrapper or bottle when one is done consuming the sustenance within.
but when so many are starving on the streets, dying from hunger and cold and heat and fatigue, what good is a book to the mind when the body and the soul are dying? what good is a book when you don't know how to read?
they're heavy, bulky, uncomfortable to sit or sleep on, they don't digest well. hell, they don't even burn all that well.
and those who can afford to treasure them, those who can go to these things and enjoy the pleasures of easy consumption, who can afford to browse at their leisure, consume some coffee, and purchase a book or two, even a collectors' item... these people would never think to steal a book left easily obtainable on the street. it just wouldn't be tasteful. it wouldn't be necessary.
just as it wouldn't be necessary for a homeless person to.
what's the point?
it wouldn't be tasty...
as for the talk (or rather, the lamely staged q&a session), i found it rather disappointing.
to be quite honest, i thot the whole thing was a shattering experience. i had never realized how many pretentious people you could pack into a house at once. not a single person i met had actually read a book by him, so when i tried to engage my fellow queuers in an empassioned discussion of his technique, style, message, and ideology (updike is, i've decided, quite the devoted mysoginist and insensitive patriarch. i don't care if the guy's won a pulitzer or two. his views are less than flattering.)
he spoke mostly about his newest book, the terrorist, about an 18-yr-old "religious zealot" of egyptian/irish heritage who i guess has a black girlfriend, who, like so many of his other female supporting characters, is not religious, though she is in the choir.
the more updike spoke, the more he seemed to reveal his less-than-accepting viewpoints. when pressed to share some of his opinions regarding new generation writers, he mentioned how he felt they didn't work hard enough to produce long-lasting careers (the reason, he says, is the way they were raised. he grew up during the depression. he learned to work hard. i guess that makes sense.)
when asked to provide the names of some fellow writers of his generation he admired, they were all (unsurprisingly, to me, but still distressing) men.
then, in the open question session, the first five and last questions were all asked by men. he only called on one woman.
one really low and embarrassing point in the lecture was when the interlocutor (head librarian, i guess, and she was kinda stiff) asked updike about the least likeable character in the book, whom she described as something like a "disgustingly overweight, unpleasant" librarian. she then asked why the least likeable character had to be a librarian. oh this was a barrel of laughs for the audience, and for updike, and one of the more light-hearted moments of the discussion, though what ensued was a distasteful and callous, offensive, and highly prejudiced skewering of the overweight (he mentioned how he decided to make the librarian character overweight because "she wouldn't have to move around much" and how she didn't like to get out of her lazy-boy [this seemed more like a critique of americans in general than the overweight or librarians, but anyway...])
what bothered me was how the whole audience was complicit in enforcing each other's healthism, and with updike at the head of the class, leading us all along, orchestrating the formation of cruel jokes and perceptions that would greatly upset me and sicken me, if i were an overweight person.
and it scared me to realize this, because we had all come into this lecture this afternoon with the aim of getting a glimpse of a famous author. we were all so star-struck by this spectacle, that we were falling victim to his celebrity, mindlessly going along with his ideas and accepting them as our own. i got a vision in that stuffy auditorium of all these pretentious older men and women going home, chatting it up with marge and steve, or the johnsons, over a glass of cabernet, and shooting the breeze, going on and on about how "down to earth" and "realistic" updike was, how amusing, how entertaining, without realizing that his literature is actually laced with a rather generous amount of mysoginy, and spiritual judgement and ridicule, to the point that i find it ridiculous and displeasing.
granted, i can understand how he was a big deal in his time, because his prose and imagery is rather impressive. but that makes me glad for the state of modern literature since, and for feminist movements and for the 60s that have occured in between.
one thing's for sure, literature is indeed a sacred medium, but one that needs to be freed from its bourgeois exclusivity. democratization and freedom of the intellectual ideas and mediums!
form and function must be united!
updike mentioned how the digitization of information perturbed him, because it makes the written word much less sacred, it changes the relationship of author to reader, which is something he values, i suppose. and i understand and sympathize with him on this one, but i wanted to ask him: what does he think the purpose and function of literature or any other creative art is? if the process of digitization of information, or the changing of the form of information is altering the nature of relationships between beings, how might this alter the meaning of ideas, and their function in our society?
i would like to know, because for me, the democratization of media is nothing if not a blessing.
because all of this, literature, the creative arts, the setting of ideas to words on paper material for distribution, isn't about that material result, but about the ephemera of the passing, the ether of the idea, the transcendence of learned and shared existence.
it's about learning to breathe and live and share with one another.
not to keep others away and out and distanced.
that is the distancing of the other.
when all i want to do is bring every one together.
posted by stephanie lee @ 10:10 PM
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