Books And Thatness

Books. Ban them all. Every one of them.

According to virtual communal web librarian Wikipedia

‘A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist, or, more informally, a bookworm’.

(‘Philobiblist’ really should be repopularized in common parlance, it manages to be both pompous, dignified and suggests a fiercely anal cleric with God most definitely on his / her side.)

The rollicking yarns the educational establishment thinks will successfully snare the wandering attention of dissolute ‘yoof’ are rarely as imaginatively off-kilter as the average person’s fantasy world.

Morally uplifting, state sanctioned novellas are generally prosaic, plodding and generic, their main attraction being the predictability of their narrative arc. Hence the universal deflating of lungs when a classroom is faced with the irritating keenness of a class dullard chasing institutional brownie points with a terrifyingly shallow analysis of a set texts subplots and thematics.

This muffled dirge rarely penetrates the skull of the moody pupils at the back of the room, still psychically traumatised by the previous evenings two chapters of William Burroughs, or suffering from a migraine induced by James Elroy’s insane retro-journalism. 

In reality, the best books always retain the feeling of illicit texts passed from hand-to-hand under counters wrapped in brown paper - introductions to a bizarre Masonic-style cult with its own rules and concerns.

This is most definitely compounded by the sheer invasive physical ‘thatness’ of book-as-object: book as musty smell; book as a diary of stains and accidents; book as a compilation of pretentious musings nestling between the hard black print in a cramped and mannered hand. 

Yet the consistent physicality of the pleasing banality of a standardised oblong slab can’t hide the fact that different books have different weights regardless of their tangible mass. It’s not a matter of gravitas, more the differing degrees of success in defying gravity, in undermining the ‘now’ and its repetitions, its unbreakable laws, and proposing healthy differences in perspective and focus. 

To further complicate matters, in parallel with this is a books automatic complicity with all other books. The social environment may now be seen as a surface to be read but this is a conceptual model which could only exist after the invention of the printing press; after all books are still a relatively new form. Volume (depth) is revealed to be a pile of slices of speculative organisation waiting to be spread out, flattened into one large page documenting human folly or charting salvation.

An organised noise or self haunting ghost, heartfelt juvenilia or a twinge of nostalgia, baring the illusion of identity or exposing the human animals flexibility of character traits - it really depends on the mood of the day or the degree of existential angst chucked up by the quotidian’s enforced repetitions.

Always keeping in mind the fact that books can also make stupidity into a viable cultural currency; unreflective tick lists of bigotry.

Actually maybe they should be banned, nothing but trouble after all.