re:considering

For a while the family has been looking at other places to live. We’re reasonably comfortable in the flat we’re in but feel the neighbourhood – the county – is not our preferred social context. Rather the opposite, in fact – we have nothing in common with people who think that being moneyed equals a free card on behaviour and that laws are for the poor.

Anyway, in the course of this search for some other place to live I have looked at a gazillion of photos depicting the homes of other people. And you know what? Most of these homes are totally devoid of books!

I am not so deluded as to thinking everyone has thousands of books in their homes. But perhaps fifty wouldn’t be too bold?

Apparently it is. Because a huge lot of people doesn’t seem to own any books. And I mean ANY books. At all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Walls full of empty white space!!!

Here’s some ideas why this is so -

People who read and discard
Yes,  they exist. I know people who is like that. People who read and read and read but once a book is read it is given to charity or sent to the dustbin or passed on to someone else. So they don’t accumulate any books.
They do have books laying around, though, so aren’t truly bookless.

People who have moved to ebooks
ebooks are convenient. They doesn’t use up space, and they are extremely portable. So this could be why the visual absence of books. But as ebooks haven’t had much impact on the Swedish market – yet – I find it unbelievable that so many people should had discarded all their paper books in favour of ebooks.
But it IS an option.

People who doesn’t read
So, I do know they exist. But so MANY?! Perhaps they are cold rationalists, denying the “false” joys of the fictional novel? But then they ought to have non fictional works. Alas, they don’t. Perhaps they find reading hard? But many of these flats seems to be lived in by people who have incomes in the higher regions or they should not be able to afford either them or the designer furniture they display.
Do they get their mental challenges from the tabloid press and the teen-blog squad that writes about the woes of the designer handbag life?
I simply don’t know.

A mystery.

And a scary one.

A teacher I once had said “an empty desk is an empty brain” – she was about as keen on tidying up her workspace as I was. In other words – not at all. And I think that sentiment apply across a wast dimension of media and storage spaces, books and walls included.

Of course this is very judgemental of me. But I can’t help it. I just can’t.

In today’s paper edition of Dagens Nyheter there’s yet another news item about a smallish book publisher in crisis. Last year was all time low for the book business in Sweden, with a record low turn-over in bookshops all around.

So, let’s look at bookshops. Do they sell books? Well, yes, but not mainly. The people owning the large chains, like Akademibokhandeln, have decided people don’t buy books… so instead they have turned into miscellanea shops. Things like paper and pens – that’s no big leap. Same with magazines. DVD’s? Chocolates, olive oil?!?! An instore Apple store?!

Well, I can actually see the justification for the Apple store BUT if you’re really committed to the digital age, perhaps you should have other brands as well… But no.

Space isn’t infinite, and these new things has pushed actual books to the back of the shops. And as someone has made the (insane) decision that people shop based on book covers covers should be exposed, not spines, which results in even less books per available shelf. And with little space you have to restrict yourself to a few best selling titles… and suddenly the difference between the book rack at the line to the check out counter at the supermarket and the bookshop has diminished beyond recognition.
And I don’t go there, because I can’t find the titles I’m interested in.

Talk about digging one’s own grave.

At the same time lots of people are talking about ebooks. I’ll hereby state that I love paper books. I love my shelves and the atmosphere the lend our flat. I love the touch and smell of books, of pulp and printers ink. I also enjoy ebooks, for their portability and for sheer reasons of space – my shelving space, like that of the bookshops, is not infinite. Those books that I own in an electronic format are actually e-editions of books that I already own, in paper format. This, to the publishing business, is actually a chance to larger sales. But the people up there doesn’t read books, apparently, and don’t socialise with people who do it either, not beyond the supermarket trash/flash. So they don’t know about patterns and opportunities like these.

On another level ebooks are considerably easier to make – yes, some manual work if the original file doesn’t use correct mark up, but beyond editing and proofing it’s just straight to the desired medium – no stock except the digital file, no costs for printing, no costs for shipping, no costs for handling unsold copies…
Marketing and editing still will be very much needed, but at the same time the possible audience has grown to encompass the whole globe and just not a specific country or region.

The possibilities are overwhelming. An online acquaintance, situated in Australia, complained yesterday that getting his hands on a certain graphic novel because the shipping, from France, would equal a week’s salary. So the publisher won’t do that sale.

Some of them publishes some books in e-format. But often just odd books, or best sellers.

In reality book sales would benefit hugely if all back catalogues were reissued as ebooks – especially for genre writers, like crime, mystery, science fiction… the back catalogue is essential, because they tend to write more than one book featuring a special character, be it officially labelled as series or not. Not to mention that niche writers would be cheaper to publish, and would more efficiently find their way to their readers.

But we all know why the publishing houses won’t rise to this. They would have to scrap most of their present infrastructure, including the knowledge of how to write contracts. Hugely impopular, especially with leaders, owners and managers that are clueless in the digital landscape.

So they sit there, with their financial losses, watching sales decline and blaming it all on the “financial crisis”, while we, the readers, lose our access to good books.

Idiots.

Picking on aliens not alien enough is a common pastime among people with a bone to chew when it comes to science fiction. Certainly not the last, but the most recent (that I know of) is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who just like all the others think aliens have to lack faces, an even set of limbs, etc, to be alien enough to qualify as aliens.

My problem with this is most of the film or book alien aren’t there as true aliens. Anyone thinking that doesn’t understand the basic premise of science fiction. At all.

True, some aliens are there to be 1000% ALIEN. Alien (the film) itself is a point in case. The Crystalline Entity, of Star Trek fame, is another. But they are fairly few, and in most cases they are symbols of Evil, or at the very least the truly undecipherable. But the wast majority are humanoid, seductively similar to us. And the ‘seductively’ part is the important one. Because it is in the way the ALMOST like us actually differ, and how we handle this, that forms the backbone of many a science fiction story. And in this it isn’t a story about foreign planets and peoples, but about us – humanity – and how we handle change, and how we interact /or not/ with people different from ourselves. Science fiction in this sense is a looking glass or a mirror, reflecting our own behaviours and customs, forming an arena for inspection and criticism, for questioning certain behaviours and world-views.

In these stories the aliens has to be reasonably humanoid or the point of it all is lost, or at least buried deep enough for it not to get through to the majority of the readers/viewers.

In this light it is totally reasonable for the atevi (Foreigner/Cherryh) to be humanoid in general appearance, just like the mri (Faded Sun/Cherryh), or the ferengi or the klingon or the andorians (Star Trek) or the Na’vi (Avatar). Just to name a few.

Picking on unalien aliens is thus so far besides the point a gas giant can pass through the resulting void. If doing it makes you happy – please continue, but don’t expect to be taken seriously by anyone.

I like books, so it’s only natural I like bookshops too. Or, perhaps LIKED should be the expression used.

When I started liking bookshops, somewhere back when I started liking books, libraries, and anything carrying books, one of the big things was how these places enabled me to go browsing. Reading spines, picking up a book to get a feel of it, weigh in in my hand, decide if it was a “buy me” or a “put me back”.

Bookshops used to be palaces for book lovers, with muffled sounds, occasionally some words between a clerk and a patron.

Books in Sweden was outrageously expensive, though, and one day back in 1996 or so I found Amazon.com. I actually have no idea what was my first book bought from them but I remember sending half of my credit card number by email and, and the other half by fax because there just wasn’t such a thing as secure online payment, and the pages were all that special web grey everything was before html expanded to allow background colour. Back then returning customers got Yule gifts – I still have a mouse mat, and a hot drinks mug.

About every fourth package got stuck in customs, increasing the cost by 25%, but even so it was worth it.

I guess it was back then it all started, and that I am part guilty – the decline of the brick’n'mortar bookshops. They have been threatened for some time now and the last handful of years I have consciously done my best to support them. Every now and then I take a detour to a bookshop. When I look for something SF or F I visit SF Bokhandeln, else I go to Akademibokhandeln at Mäster Samuelsgatan. Lately I have been forced to order from an online entity nonetheless, because the books that I’ve been looking for has been very much absent from the shelves.
But at one special occasion the book WAS there but scandalously overpriced – buying it online from a company functioning as the online presence of Akademibokhandeln (Bokus.se) made it over 100 SEK (about US$14) cheaper. I had opted to support the shop with a street window but decided to leave without making a purchase.

Last week I went there again. I decided some time ago that I wanted to read Macbeth and I was pretty sure the largest bookshop in the Swedish capital would have a copy. It is a famous play by a famous playwright – a classic. Enter bookshop. I already knew there was a instore Apple Store at the entrance. I ventured further, and realised they had discontinued their paperback/english paperback section on the second floor. I went in search for it and found it had replaced a huge and interesting section of interesting non fiction books (maps and travel miscellanea). Also they had managed to make place for a rather large section of DVD’s… anyway, I found a shelf labelled English Classics, and started to browse. No Shakespeare. I found a clerk, who directed me to the “drama shelf”, in the “red section”, a mezzanine floor away. I went there. I searched. I asked another clerk. He told me he understood my difficulties and led me to the shelf. It turned out to be about three metres of swedish drama, and perhaps one and a half of english language drama. He started to look for the book, looked at me, shaking his head. Not one edition of Macbeth. He went to his desk, made a search, and informed me that no, they weren’t planning on ever stocking it again (admittedly this was the Oxford Shakespeare edition; they MIGHT have some other editions, in the future – I don’t know).
Hello! It’s MACBETH!!! I don’t expect the paperback peddler at the train station to shelve it but I d***n right expect to find it in the largest bookshop in town.

In all honesty I don’t think I’ll go there again for quite a while. I demand more of something called a bookshop than one million copies of the latest Dan Brown or Twilight book. And don’t get me started on this annual sale that’s about to start… I won’t dictate other peoples’ tastes in books but that anything at all, beyond cookbooks and children’s books, gets sold is a mystery to me.

Somewhere at the beginning of this rant I mentioned SF Bokhandeln. They’re a bit better than the general bookshops. But almost every second time I visit I have to leave without what I was looking for. As an example they don’t stock one single volume from Roger Zelazny. Not in the year or so I have been looking. And often only half of the books in a series is available, even when they’re possible to order, instant delivery, online.

Note that I SUPPORT their existence. I go out of my way to buy books from real life shops. I’m very close to giving up on them, however. I’ll have a bit more patience with SF Bokhandeln. But Akademibokhandeln… bye bye. You’re not a bookshop any more.

As a rule I have small patience for works in the fantasy genre. I have not stopped to analyse why; I just tend not to choose to read a work of fantasy, except if it has gotten raving good reviews by people who I trust.

Reading Eco‘s The Search for the Perfect Language has inadvertently provided me with some tools for analysing, though. While telling the story of the search for the perfect language the book also works as a rough catalogue listing different beliefs and concepts ruling the statesmen, intellectuals and the church of Europe, starting with the late Greeks and proceeding through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and into our own time.

This exposé of the evolution of ideas is extraordinary (and quite fun, Eco has a wry sense of humour and I do not agree with those deeming this a “dry” book). He connects the need for different ideological constructs with the economic history of Europe, the development of the nation states, etcetera, all the while telling the reader about one bizarre idea after another – ideas genuinely held as true, at least by the originator, some hundreds of years ago.

And as I said – it also helped me analyse my aversion against a lot of fantasy. Because there, in the clear open, lies a smorgasbord of ‘magical’ concepts commonly used in fantasy novels. Everyone of them justified, historically, by a lack of knowledge and a wealth of imagination, and a basketful of faith, in one god or another (but mainly one in number, lol, whatever the creed of the originator).

Today superstition can’t be justified, at all – it’s just ignorance, or wishful thinking. Of course, most fantasy isn’t about today, or about ‘here’. This means that if the concept is well executed and the characters are nicely done the book can be a highly enjoyable experience. If not it just becomes a hotchpotch with deus ex machina on deus ex machina – it’s just poor writing, nothing more. However famous the author.

Urban fantasy is even worse. It’s supposed to be here and now, with werewolves and demons and whathaveyou (zombies, now, are the worst – don’t get me started…). It’s just so unbelievable and… downright INANE.
I get very sad when authors I otherwise think highly of do this kind of book. Like Guy G Kay did with Ysabel…

Most of these books are written as pure ‘entertainment’, many of them utilising the horror trope. I have no problems with that. Entertainment is good, I read a lot of books for entertainment, not to mention watching TV or films. Now, to me, of course, entertainment is not having to wince inwardly twice on every page, like I do when I read a Harry Dresden book. So it’s poor entertainment.

I accept that some people like these things. Everyone to his or her own. As far as I’m concerned, though, it’s NOT my cup of tea. At all. And now I know why.
Thank you, Umberto Eco, for that.

I’m of the firm belief that all human beings are born being creative and innovative. It’s a survival trait, we have to be able to solve hitherto unencountered problems to grow up and we often have to make do without the help of others. As time and socialisation works on us we learn to shed or hide that creativity. We learn to conform, to do as expected. We learn that some solutions are NOT valid in this particular society. IF we are lucky we can see that this is not the case universally but we’re still encouraged to do it the way we do it here. So to speak.
This is of course also a kind of survival trait. It works to unify a certain community, to make that community walk in step. This is what the community needs, and often it benefits the citizens of that community.

Sometimes it gets too strict, though. In our present time we get told that being creative is childish and irresponsible.

I think this is one of the reasons the mainstream despise the science fiction genre. Only the other day I had a conversation were the other part said he had enjoyed SF when he was a kid but then grew out of it, then going on to tell that what had been so great with it was how it showed other perspectives, other ideas, other ways to organise society. And believe it or not but he was talking of Flash Gordon! Science fiction is, at it’s root, creative, and demands a mentality that wants to make that journey, to explore the unknown.

Contrast this with the kind of mainstream books out on the market who works to explore certain relationships or characters (mother-daughter, father-son). Those books work to establish which step to walk in, and to assure the reader that other people have felt that way and it’s only normal.

Society needs balance. Society needs both a solid ground to stand on and creativity. Society needs both kinds of literature/fiction.

But it would be so much easier if those reading confirmation lit could acknowledge that while the explorative stuff is not their cup of tea at least it’s not unworthy of a grown up mind.

I’m a bit jaded. I’ve seen technologies come and go, and after having invested time and effort into them I have lived to see most of them fade away. This have meant I’m not too keen on ‘new’ things. Not that I’m not interested, or curious. But most things I have seen before.

The difference now is, of course, there’s a critical mass. Places like LinkedIn and Facebook, services like Yammer and Twitter – they only grow important and inevitable if enough people uses them. And in western society of today, enough people have made the transition into the digital age to make those places viable.

The internet is perceived as a fast medium. Books is a slow medium, and TV is in between. Are books on the loosing end of this equation? Will books loose the importance they have had in conveying knowledge and ideas, historically?

These are some of my thoughts -

As long as people have been able to write written documents have been of some import. Used for to keep count of things, but also for poetry and political diatribe (a favourite in most ‘civilized’ societies, it seems!) and to document knowledge and theories. But prior to the advent of the printing press, books where both written and bound by hand, and very much one off. Rich people paid to have copies made, and the copies varies between them – bits and pieces shorn off or added so to ring true to current ideas and policies. Despite this books made a difference. Through books concepts of arithmetic and medicine got introduced to western Europe. Books, in a more conceptual way, because they are often scrolls, also was used to shape history. Hagiographies and biographies was used to reshape past events, and as those documents are what survived our sources are skewed. I’d argue that this was the intent, and in many ways they have proved successful.

Anyway, in more recent times books have had some impact. Think of The origin of the Species, which have affected us whether we think the earth is 4000 years old or if we think we and the world around us have evolved for millennia. There are, of course, more recent examples. This is not the place to name them – the list is huge and contains different books depending on culture and geography.

Today fewer and fewer read. The publishing houses are, on an international level, consolidating, meaning a handful of people decide what will get printed or not (Sweden, on the contrary, have a lot of small independent publishers). Ideas are conveyed via the internet and TV, and are so many most of us have no means of sorting or organizing the stuff in anything resembling a coherent picture. Some may argue that we are leaving the printed word for a more oral/visual culture.

If I may I’d say that if so we are only returning to what we left when we started to commit ink to paper (or papyrus or whatever). Humankind survived through millennia before we started to make markings more linguistically coherent than cave paintings.

Are we going backwards? Or are we leaving an intermediate state, to return to a way of communicating more consistent with ourselves as human beings?

I for one think books will continue to be important. In some contexts not HOW MANY but WHO and WHAT are the important factors. Books for pure entertainment? That will, regrettably, be a diminishing niche. Or so I think.

Thanks to my friends at The Green Dragon, and especially to JPB who brought this up (“Is the age of “writers shaping culture” over?”) (even if it wasn’t originally intended to take the turn it did. But that’s the way with discussions, so only to be expected!)

Last year when I read Powers by Ursula K Le Guin, the third novel in the sequence Annals of the Western Shore, I could not help but reflect that if that story had been written by a man this would had been branded a piece of true misogyny. Throughout the story, aimed at young adult readers, women are systematically treated as objects and frequently as objects without worth beyond the physical. Only at the very end do we get to see that this is not how it must be, and even then it is ambiguous.

This is not the first time that happens in her writings. I think her method is to show the world as it is, in all it’s cruelty, and then offer alternatives or strategies. It’s not a very direct method but she manages, mainly because I as a reader know her for a feminist. But this begs the question what would happen with how we interpreted her stories if there wasn’t a name attached to them.

Compare with the female characters, and the worlds, described by Guy G Kay. Some women thinks he writes good female characters but most seem to think him a chauvinist, always describing worlds and circumstances were women are secondary beings left to their own often subversive strategies if they are to survive or hold power, and often with their bodies as part of the game.
Given that Kay often writes historical fiction rather than the fantasy his books are tagged with, is this so strange?

Should an author be charged with writing only worlds or tales she or he would want for themselves, or do an author have the possibility to make up worlds and situations as stages for discussion and elaboration, extrapolation, debate?

Granted Kay has no feminist agenda, but in some ways his writings works just as well as Le Guin’s to show what is wrong with a society, from a gender perspective. But he is a man, is he not, and not gay (what I know, anyway, I generally don’t care but feminists often seems to do), so he just HAS to be chauvinist. Stands to reason, no?

I don’t say that they should be equalled. It is allowed to be appalled or charmed by both, either or none of them. But I do have to wonder where and by what criteria we place our borders.

After having it warm shelf space for some time I’m finally reading The Dark Heart of Italy, by Tobias Jones, and halfway through the section labelled The mother of all slaughters, which discusses political terrorism in Italy during the 60′s through early 80′s, I can’t help but think of another book – Tigana, by Canadian author of literary fantasy Guy Gavriel Kay.

Why? Because the strategies employed in Tigana by Alessan and Baerd in their attempt to liberate their country is exactly the same as used by the fascist movement during Italy’s anni di piombo – the years of lead – when so many people died in terrorist attacks aiming at destabilizing the state.
Or, at least that’s my interpretation. I’m sure Italians have another opinion on it, this in itself depending on political heritage.

Anyhow, it is striking how Kay manages to hide the fact that the protagonists of Tigana are engaged in systematic terrorism behind a veil of sympathy for the cause, for the underdog, for the repressed people. Interestingly enough the setting is very Italian, not only the general geography and culture but the political stage with city states and a very end-of-wwII set-up with two warring conquerors /the Allies with the Italian king on one side and the Germans with Il Duce on the other/.

To me, reading The Dark Heart of Italy is like being given the final pieces of the jigsaw, the key to understanding Tigana. If this is how Kay intended his piece of fiction to be read I have to wonder about his political leanings, about his objectives. But possibly he’s just another romantic academic, exploring histories to which he himself has no emotional connection – only curiosity.

Personally I enjoy books because they offer the possibility to explore hypothesises. I also enjoy stories that poses questions or that casts light on situations we no longer reflect over because we are so used to them. Too used to them, sometimes. Like the concept of humanity, or the role of religion in conflicts, or whose subjective ideas are viewed as objective truths. Like the concept of power, or history.
The best authors are those who manages to ask all these ‘what ifs’ while at the same time conjure believable characters and a page-turning story.
I’m not hardcore on the characterisation stuff, though. I really really want believable characters BUT sometimes the author makes such a good job with story and ideas that I can accept the thin personalities. Books by Neal Stephenson (this link goes to his Wiki page – this one is for his website) usually fits this last category, this latest book Anathem a point in case.

I also enjoy books for the comfort they bring. Some books are like old friends. Other books are made for reading while you’re sick or generally low. Some of them are the same as those above, but not necessarily so. I used to reread Good Omens whenever I felt down but nowadays when I am sick I mostly reread the Foreigner series.

Some books are stuffed with fast carbohydrates. Pleasurable while they last but leaving you feeling empty afterwards. I think the Dresden Files a typical specimen. It’s like fast food, fluff. Fun, and don’t bear scrutiny.

Others are elaborate, yes, byzantine!, mysteries that challenges the mind’s puzzle solving faculties.

Of course books can also be a source of knowledge. When you use them as such I think it important to look at them and ask when were they written and what are the objectives of the author. Because in some cases even textbooks and encyclopaedias can be prejudiced. Just pick any 100 year old encyclopaedia and check the word ‘Africa’ if you don’t believe me. Racial bias didn’t get non-PC until after wwII.

So many uses for books, and all statistics (from Statistics Sweden, in Swedish) show people read less and less.

Makes me sad.