Wednesday 27 April 2011

The art of physical criticism

From glue and scissors to tearing or throwing, how do you vent your frustration with substandard books? And have you ever saved a precious tome for the best possible conditions?

Sentimental authors should probably look away now. Anyone who regards their printed works as their brainchildren won't want to be confronted by the following, which appeared on my recent blog about The Forever War, courtesy of a poster called penileplethysmograph:

"Re: Heinlein. Decades ago, I had one book of his (can't remember the title) which had duelling as a central theme (Heinlein was such a right wing type libertarian haha). I ended up shooting it to bits with some air pistols I was holding for a friend. That showed it! Real criticism :)."

Ouch. But also, yes! Try doing that to an ebook. How intensely satisfying. A fine reminder that there are more ways to skewer a paper book than by writing snippy reviews. You can, for instance, knife it. You can tear it asunder. You can squish it, mish it and mash it into a completely new shape. You can, as per Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, subvert its meaning with the judicious use of glue and scissors. You can spend a lot of time neatly crossing out the words you don't like. You can turn your objections into weird and wonderful artwork.

All of these acts of defacement and destruction are creative and funny. But that doesn't mean I want to encourage them. I may laugh, but I also shudder. I'm sure a part of the enjoyment stems from the fact that destroying printed matter seems such a transgression. There's something shocking about physical attacks on books: it's a denial of the strange power we invest in these inanimate objects; of how strongly they pull on our emotions. I imagine that few people reading this article haven't already thought of the book-burning crimes of the Nazis and the Catholic church. Yet even without such horrors, there's the troubling idea that to destroy a book is to deprive anyone else a chance of reading it. It seems like an affront to posterity.

But "seems" is probably the operative word there. Viewed rationally, a physical attack on a book is the last thing a bibliophile needs to worry about. As a critic, I've no problem with dissuading people from reading books. But I'm sure nine out of 10 authors would prefer that someone bought and destroyed their work rather than didn't read it at all. It's ignoring a book that really hurts us. Let's not pretend either that most books don't end up destroyed, one way or another. Paper has a finite life. Digital files, meanwhile, rarely seem to make it past their first decade. Books might furnish a room, but they also get in the bloody way and are chucked out all the time. The lucky ones make it to secondhand and charity shops and get a second go. The majority end up with companies like Pulp Friction who find various ingenious ways of reusing them, such as turning them into lampshades or using them as filler beneath our roads.

Even so, I find it next to impossible to throw out books or damage them. When I was doing my A-levels I spent unhealthy amounts of revision time trying to decide from which bridge I would drop Howards End. But once I'd done the exam, I didn't have the heart, or maybe just couldn't be bothered. Either way, it stayed on the shelf, I've still got it now and I'm glad. The last time I actually went for a paperback, I was half drunk, in a cabin in the north of Sweden and it had been a long time since I'd seen daylight. I hurled my copy of The Da Vinci Code across the room. I still remember the wonderful sense of catharsis and harmless contravention. But then there was the weird guilt, and the frightening knowledge that it was the only thing left that I had to read. Worse still, I had to go crawling across the room 10 minutes later, just to find out what happened next. All in all, a pretty pathetic display.

My original intention at this point was to ask you if you've ever done better ? with suitable caveats about my not actually wanting to encourage any destructive naughtiness. But then a poster called Kulturtrager left the following lovely message on that Forever War blog:

"I read it one night, in a tent in the tropics, as the rain poured down. Reading by hurricane lamp in those conditions only added to the wonderful atmosphere of the book."

It occurred to me that an equally valid form of physical criticism is to read a book in the best possible conditions. That special novel saved for an unbroken, indulgent hammock-based holiday read. The one with pages swollen by bathwater and smeared with food because you had to read it everywhere you went. The one ... well, you tell me. Physical criticism, good and bad, how do you like to mete it out?


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/apr/27/physical-criticism-books

Shia LeBouef Bruno Mars Thierry Henry Cheryl Cole

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