In the early 1980s, when I first read these three novels by Robertson Davies, I knew nothing about him, though he was perhaps the most famous writer in Canada by then. I sought out and read everything he had ever written, as well as everything he continued to write in the next decade until his death. It was a satisfying journey. It is a journey I would take again, though I don’t often re-read books anymore.
[Originally posted on my discontinued This Old Book Tumblr.]
Starting around 1968, Harlan Ellison wrote a column of TV criticism for the L.A. Free Press. Ellison, the prolific speculative fiction author and TV writer, railed against the mediocre prime-time offerings of the day, recounted his battles with TV producers who rewrote and botched his scripts, and took shots at the Nixon administration over Vietnam. The stuff hasn’t aged all that well, and I won’t be buying the $750 signed limited edition with the updated audio rant. The material was already dated by the time I got my 13-year-old hands on these books with their references to current events and shows that were already half-forgotten (The Mod Squad, Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers, Julia, First Tuesday, The Name of the Game, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir). I am impressed Ellison managed to watch so much TV without benefit of a VCR or DVR. For me, the books are a sort of personal museum for the 13-year-old me who found resonance in Ellison’s boiling, foul-mouthed rage at mass culture. His take on one week’s top Nielsen’s ratings:
Six of the 10 leading items are wafer-thin, inane, excruciatingly banal situation comedies dealing with a view of American home life that simply does not exist save in the minds of polyannas and outpatients from the Menninger Foundation. .. While their world gets ripped along the dotted line, the average middle-class consumer-slaphappy American opts for escapist entertainment of the most vapid sort. …No wonder [there is] such umbrage and outrage by the masscult mind at the doings of the Revolution: they sit night in and night out sucking up fantasy that tells them even hillbilly idiots with billions living in Beverly Hills are just plain folks.
This cult novel by Richard Fariña, classmate of Thomas Pynchon, Kirkpatrick Sale and others, includes some scenes inspired by events on the Cornell campus in the 1950s. I bought this weather-beaten copy in college when some friends became obsessed with Fariña, who died at 29 in a motorcycle accident shortly after its publication in 1966. The style is lyrical stream of consciousness in places:
I bought this in a used bookstore in Ithaca sometime in the 1980s. It was written in 1938, when perhaps we knew less about addiction and alcohol abuse than we do now. It’s not really about drinking. Translated from the French, it is a hallucinatory fever dream, a philosophical treatise, a surreal satire, featuring encounters with “the fabricators of useless objects,” “the fidgeters,” “scienters” and others. Daumal is perhaps better known for a similar but slightly less interesting book, “Mount Analogue.” I lost my copy of that somewhere. Here are the opening lines of the first section (“A labored dialogue on the power of words and the frailty of thought”):
It was late when we drank. We all thought it was high time to begin. What there had been before, no one could remember. We just said it was already late. To inquire where each of us came from, at what precise point on the globe we were, or if it were really a globe (and in any case it was not a point), and what day of the month of what year, was beyond our powers. You don’t ask such questions when you are thirsty.
This book is an expanded version of a nine-part Pulitzer Prize-winning series published in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991. The pointed question, and the overall tone of the series, struck a chord with readers, who lined up around the block at the newspaper’s headquarters to purchase copies and flooded the paper with thousands of messages and letters (at a time before widespread E-mail made that an easy thing to do). Statistics showed the widening gap between rich and poor, and how changes in the tax law had encouraged this gap. It noted the decline in defined benefit pensions, and other trends that accelerated after the turnaround and prosperity of the later 1990s. I admired its ambition and thoroughness of the investigation, so I bought a copy of the paperback reprint for posterity. I was reminded of it in 2011 when the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements expressed similar discontent to the early 90s and focused on some of the same issues (growing federal debt and deficit, and widening income inequality). Donald Barlett and James Steele say they are now revisiting the series. Their former newspaper, alas, is in a rough patch now, its golden age of ambitious investigative journalism and editorial integrity a distant memory.
The year was 1987. Personal computers were less than a decade old. I had been working a couple of years earlier as a reporter for a newspaper that still used electric typewriters. The Web did not exist. E-mail was something still new and amazing. Personal hand-held mobile phones were still an expensive novelty. The videocassette recorder and the compact disc were the height of consumer technology.
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the organizer of the first “Hackers’ Conference,” wrote about Nicholas Negroponte and the M.I.T. Media Lab, where the future we live in now was just starting to be imagined. With chapter headings like “intelligent television” and “paperback movies,” this book was more influential on my career and thinking as a journalist than anything else I have ever read (though Kevin Kelly’s “Out of Control” came close in 1994). Its predictions were off here and there, but it explained how all those bits were going to change everything sooner or later.
Here is a sentence I underlined: “Even copy machines and photography are going digital.” Obvious now, a revelation then. As was this: “E-mail evaporates the tyranny of place, and to a considerable degree, of time.” And I don’t know if Brand came up with the idea or borrowed it from someone at the lab, but there is this observation on page 202: “Information wants to be free.”
People who repeat that now often forget the corollary that followed in the book: “Information also wants to be expensive.” Eight long years later, the future foretold in this book started to come true for me. I spent the first three decades of my life waiting for the Web to be invented, and the second two playing and working in it. What’s next?
Here’s that full passage on information (the introduction to a discussion of movie piracy — on videocassette):
Information Wants to Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, “intellectual property,” and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.
I bought this at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe in Baltimore in the late 80’s. It was first published in 1965; this was a reprint. In the opening pages, a young woman puts on a hood to protect her anonymity and enters a meeting where the bourgeois confess their sins of middle-class mediocrity and conformity. Satire.
I remember when I first bought this one in a used paperback store in the 1970’s in Utica, N.Y., where my mother would take me after a visit to the allergy specialist. The book was originally published in 1949 and has been reissued periodically, but tends to go out of print. This appears to be the 1966 Ace Books version, priced at 75 cents (as the poem on the back attests). Silverlock is shipwrecked and find himself on an island where heroic tales have come alive (if I recall, he seems quite unaware of the stories, or he would have figured out what to do in a few cases). I reread it dozens of times as a teenager. Somehow it survived years of culling of my books. I have no memory of the quality of the prose, but I’m pretty sure it was a pleasing adventure yarn. I am hesitant to ruin the good but fading memories by cracking it again. For years, the book and its author were a mystery to me, for I would have gobbled up more, but could never find anything. Now, through the miracle of Wikipedia, some of my questions are answered. There was apparently a sequel in 1981, but I had moved on.
This belonged to my father. The copyright page lists the copyright date as 1918, but it may have been a type of textbook series (“The Modern Student’s Library”) that my father bought in the 1940’s, while he was in graduate school at Columbia after the war, courtesy of the G.I. bill. He penciled his name in the cover, along with a notation about some other literature. Most people remember Stevenson as the author of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Treasure Island,” if they remember him at all. These 24 essays on Thoreau, Pepys, Whitman, idlers, marriage, reading in general and other topics were written before his fame, and some are quite fine. My father scribbled notes in the margins of some, notably “Crabbed Age and Youth” (1878) and here is Stevenson’s humbling wisdom, a shout 130 years into the future:
“In short, if youth is not quite right in in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusing that he is at last entirely right.”
Dr. Lewis Thomas achieved some fame as an essayist for The New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps most famously with the collection “Lives of a Cell.” But for whatever reason it was “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” that has survived on my shelves since I purchased it in paperback some 28 years ago. I remember being affected by his death in 1993, perhaps because mortality and doom was so often his topic, and I was a young man in my 20s and therefore overly obsessed with both topics. My mother had died in middle age right after I graduated from college, and I imagined my own death could not be far off. This book opens with a meditation on Hiroshima and ends with the title essay, about the threat of nuclear destruction from an exchange of missiles between America and the Soviet Union. This was a real prospect that we lived with every day, and it was a given belief among people in my generation that we would probably all die in a horrific world explosion some day. His late night thoughts on the missiles are bracing, and thankfully he has been proven wrong so far by the unexpected turns in history that would come in the years after he wrote these words in the early 1980s:
“I am old enough by this time to be used to the notion of dying, saddened by the glimpse when it has occurred but only transiently knocked down, able to regain my feet quickly at the thought of continuity, any day. I have acquired and held in affection until very recently another sideline of an idea which serves me well at dark times: the life of the earth is the same as the life of an organism: the mind contains an infinite number of thoughts and memories: when I reach my time I may find myself still hanging around in some ort of midair, one of those small thoughts, drawn back into the memory of the earth: in that peculiar sense I will be alive. Now all that has changed. I cannot think that way anymore. Not while those things are still in place, aimed everywhere, ready for launching.”