Maverick Philosopher

"Have You Read Them All?"

It is not unusual for a non-bookman, upon entering the book-lined domicile of a bookman, to crack, "Have you read them all?"  The quip smacks of a veiled accusation of hypocrisy, the suggestion being that the bookman is making a false show of an erudition and well-readedness the likes of which  he does not possess.  I invariably reply, "This is no show library, this is a working library."  That tends to shut 'em up.

A nephew gave me a coffee cup inscribed thusly: "A room without books is like a body without a soul."  The attribution was to Cicero, but one learns to take such attributions cum grano salis.   Whatever the quotation's source, it sums up the matter well.

John Heidenry's Zero at the Bone

There is serious reading and there is bed reading.  Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul.  It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provide by desk, hard chair, note-taking and coffee-drinking.  It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline.  Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure.  The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or improved, but entertained.

I came across Heidenry's Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute, and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease (St. Martin's 2009) by chance at a local library.  I would never buy a book like this because at best it is  worth reading only once.  But its skillful noir recounting of a 1953 kidnapping and murder most definitely held my interest over the few days it took me to read it in those delicious intervals lying abed before nod-off.  But I have to wonder about books that anatomize depravity while eschewing all moral judgment.  A large topic this, one that I will get around to eventually.

I now hand off to Janet Maslin's NYT review.

If Everyone Were Like Me . . .

. . . there would be no used bookstores: I keep all my books. So it is a good thing for me that not everyone is like me.

Never Buy a Book You Haven't Read

It's a good maxim. But I hear an objection coming. "If you've already read a book, why do you need to buy it?" Because the only books worth owning are the ones worth reading more than once.

'He's Only Reading'

This just over the transom from Londiniensis:

Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man.  At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can go in. The professor’s not doing anything, he’s only reading”.

Ambivalence towards reading and other activities in the life of the mind reflects the fact that we are embodied spirits.  As spirits, we dream and imagine, think and question, doubt and despair.  We ask what is real and what is not.  It is no surprise, then, that we question the reality and importance of reading and writing and study when these activities are not geared to what is immediate and utilitarian such as the earning of money.  Our doubts are fueled in no small measure by the lethargy and hebetude of the body with its oppressive presence and incessant demands.  The spectator of all time and existence, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Plato's Republic, should  fully expect to be deemed  one who is 'not really doing anything' by the denizens of the Cave.

The bias against the spirit is reflected in the phrase 'gainful employment.'  What is intended is pecuniary gain, as if there is no other kind.  The bias, however, is not without  its justification, as we are embodied beings subject to all the vicissitudes and debilities of material beings generally.

Companion post:  Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood

Books and Reality and Books

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

All things human are ambiguous and so it is with books and bookishness by which I mean their reading, writing, buying, selling, trading, admiring, collecting, cataloging, treasuring, fingering, storing, and protecting. Verbiage, endless verbiage! Dusty tomes and dry paper from floor to ceiling! Whether written or spoken, words appear at one or more removes from reality, assuming one knows what that is.

But what exactly is it, and where is it to be found? In raw sensation? In thoughtless action? In contemplative inaction? In amoral animal vitality? In the fool's paradise of travel? In the diaspora of entertainment and amusement? In the piling up of consumer goods? In finite competitive selfhood? In the quest for name and fame? Is it to be found at all, or rather made? Is it to be discovered or decided?

It appears that we are back to our 'unreal' questions about reality and the real, questions that are asked and answered at the level of thought and written about in books, books, and more books . . . .

Book Matters

Gypsy Scholar Horace Jeffery Hodges burrows deep into some borrowed Jackson.

Holbrook Jackson would find this development, a bookless library, nauseating. (Via Joel Hunter)  It is foolish  for a school to discard its books in order to go entirely digital given the fragility of electronic media.   More here.

The Denver Bibliophile e-mailed me today asking me what I think of his blog.  I would have to read more to have a firm opinion, but it looks promising. Pay him a visit.

Mirabile dictu, my visit to The Book Gallery in Mesa this morning  issued in no purchases, but I did drop a few bucks at Bookman's also in Mesa.  Laziness militates against the listing of my acquisitions.

A Rare Find: The Anatomy of Bibliomania

One of the pleasures of the bookish life is the 'find,' the occasion on which, whilst browsing through a well-stocked used book store, one lights upon a volume which one would never discover in a commercial emporium devoted to the purveyance of contemporary schlock. One day, after a leisurely lunch, I walked into a book store on Mesa, Arizona's Main Street and stumbled upon Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, a 1978 Octagon Books reprint of the 1950 original. There is something of Jungian synchronicity in this, as I had recently made the acquaintance of Mr. Jackson at Michael Gilleland's erudite salon. The author describes his purpose thusly:

Abandoning Ambition, Let Us Repair to the Portico. . .

Thanks to open library stacks, I stumbled across the epigrams of Martial a while back. (Therein lies an argument for open stacks.) Marcus Valerius Martialis was so-named because he was born on March 1. He first saw the light of day circa A.D. 40 at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis. So far to me he seems a scribbler of no great importance, though he is entertaining, and, like Samuel Pepys, another scribbler of no great importance, he affords an insight into the times in which he lived and into the invariability of human folly. If I knew more of Martial, and more of Truman Capote, perhaps I would compare them: superficial, sycophantic, but prodigious in their quill-driving. In any case, here for leisurely consumption is one of Martial's more substantial epigrams, addressed to another Martial, his old friend Iulius Martialis:

Idiotic Marginalia From Marginal Idiots

Have you noticed that the same people who are morally obtuse enough to underline and annotate public library books tend to be the same people who are too intellectually obtuse to make good comments? If they are going to deface public property, they should at least have the decency to stun us with the brilliance of their commentary, the magnificence of their marginalia, the glory of their glosses. I don't believe I have ever read a good marginalium in a public library book.

And why do the cretins return the volumes?  Having littered the margins with their precious observations, they would have some reason to keep the books.

Library Stacks: Open or Closed?

Some punk having badly defaced a  book I was about to check out, I had the librarian make a note to that effect lest I be accused of the barbarism.  I mentioned to the librarian that the widespread disrespect shown to public property is an argument against socialism.  He responded that it is an argument against open stacks.  He had a point, but on the other side of the question:

Open library stacks allow for browsing and finding books that otherwise might have gone undetected. I was on the prowl in the BDs a while back looking for BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason and Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction. Searle's book hangs out at BD 418.3.S4. Nearby, at BD 418.3.S78, I spied Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (1998). Though published by an obscure press, and obviously a reworking of the author's dissertation, it is turning out to be an outstanding resource. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I found it. But I might not have, had the stacks been closed.

On the other hand, open stacks allow any Tom, Dick, or Mary to cause mischief by stealing, defacing, hiding and otherwise mishandling books. A common problem is the removal of a volume and its return to the wrong position. Such a book is as as good as lost. A librarian acquaintance tells me that the problem is worse than one might think.

No doubt there are other considerations relevant to the open/closed question. But for the moment, I'm for open stacks. In a society as tolerant of bad behavior as ours is, however, one wonders how long libraries can remain unprotected. 

Of Books and Men

A book is a man at his best. Who knows what Plato was like in the flesh? Maybe he suffered from halitosis. Perhaps he was unbearably domineering. But in his books I have him at my beck and call, for instruction, uplift, or just to keep the pre-Socratics from improperly fraternizing with Aristotle.

Each book on my shelves is a window, a window opening out upon a world. From Aristotle to Zubiri, window after window, world upon world . . .