The Future of the Book

While I was in New York a couple months ago, I visited the home office of Archipelago Books in their lair in the American Can Factory, down by the Gowanus Canal. Jill Schoolman has put together the most tantalizing operation. Long shelves on either side of the big room are filled with the four-year-old press’s offerings of translated literature, which taken together or singly, are unspeakably beautiful. That’s a physical fact. As for the words—the variety, the challenges and poetry and particular articulations from faraway places—I will want to say more, here and elsewhere: about Magdalena Tulli’s Moving Parts and Dreams and Stones and this season’s Flaw; about Marguerite Duras’s Yann Andréa Steiner; about Elias Khoury’s much celebrated Gate of the Sun and his recent Yalo. (It occurs to me that the blurb from Edward Said about Khoury makes an apt description of Archipelago itself—it is a press giving voice to “dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.”)

Oh, and I want the two previously untranslated Cortázar books and A Mind at Peace, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, which Orhan Pamuk calls “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.”

Yes: I covet them. Even their paperbacks I want to hold and go on holding, and this makes the Archipelago books one answer to the questions raised at the panel and lecture I went to a few weeks ago on the future of the book. When Amazon released their Kindle the next Monday, it felt a bit like a continuation of the conference, at which Joseph Epstein regaled us with his idea of the book ATM; Terry Belanger raised his mischievous brow over the edge of his laptop to talk about how books might be like horses (we may not use them to plow the fields anymore, but people still live with them); Lisa Gitelman performed a neat and energizing debunking of the “moral outrage” and questionable logic at work in the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report; and Sven Birkerts gave in measured tones a talk about “the hive life” and a promising yelp of discovery at one point in the very brief discussion after.

About Birkerts’ personal revelation, I know nothing. Soon after the very interesting trio of mini-talks, questions were abruptly cut off, discussion ended.

The panel was moderated by Corey Flintoff and the NPR gloss he provided for the Mt. Holyoke/Five College/Museums10 event perhaps perfectly coincided with my colleague’s comment about the quantity of gray hair in the audience and her friend’s grumbling about how no students had actually shown up.

As I drove home, thinking about facing the work that had been on my plate at the day’s start, and was still there because I’d gone to the conference, I got grumpier. I was thinking about the amount of time and money that had gone into the conference—the museum meetings, the devoted independent bookstore owner schlepping the piles of books for people to peruse (buy?), the academics who were paid to present, and arrangements that must have been made to acquire the voice of Flintoff. All the human effort. And it was over. Like that. No real discussion.

And who comes to such things—who from the community, who of working people, who of young people—who comes to discuss the future of the book?

And, indeed, why should we?

Why would anyone who is on the outside of that conversation want to enter it? And how could they?

This passes for intellectual life? I was fuming by the time I reached the Coolidge Bridge. This is public discussion?

As Larry Kramer’s teeshirt says: Where is the outrage?

And yes, over even this: That so much arranging and organizing and spending and politesse and human capital goes into a simulation of intellectual engagement whose very structure dampens its possiblity. And that this is taken as a matter of course.

Why talk about the future of the book, how bleak the year 2007 in publishing as though it’s separate from the bleakness of these times?

So the Congress voted this week to devote $70 billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s about $233 per US citizen.

For much less than my war share, I could get a subscription to the entire spring list from Archipelago.