Making book in 2012

A rumination on five books, 4 real and one imaginary

It's an issue I'd expected or at least hoped was going to temper with age, because it gives me a lot of grief and it's boringly typical mid-life crisis material (that my age has now finally caught up with). This question of vocation. I used to blame it on my father, his capital-C Calling. As I drift (there's no other word for what I've been doing lately) further past that bright dividing line where what he does became what he did, I begin to think that while I might have gotten this bug, this need to be defined by a profession, from him, it was probably at a much more fundamental level than merely nurture. Something in the cells, the genes, the architecture of my brain. Something in the way I'm wired.

That expression, the way I'm wired, is one I picked up from William Gibson, from Neuromancer, a construction that wormed its way deep enough inside my head that I use it unconsciously, non-referentially, like it was something I came up with myself, or something of the common coinage. Which is irritating, because I generally find it embarrassing by proxy when people use fictional devices as if they were normal components of language, like people who say "shiny" as if it were normal slang for "good".

Somehow I totally missed cyberpunk when it happened, I was reading 50s-70s era science fiction classics from the hardcover stacks of Montevideo's (Minnesota, not Uruguay, natch) local library and fat, terrible fantasy paperbacks from the recent acquisitions rack of the same, and then I got put onto literature, and sometime mid- to early post-college I got back onto contemporary science fiction, having pretty much missed the 80's.

I was never a "fan" proper and this was still pretty much pre-internet for me so I'd managed to never even hear of Neuromancer when I noticed its incongruous presence on the bookshelf of my wife-to-be (she's not a science fiction reader, at all, and I still don't really know why she ended up buying it sometime in the very early 90's). I was actually not that taken with it on first pass, I read it too quickly which made its narrative style come across as fractured and murky. But it got some hook in me and I went back, and again. It ended up being for a while one of those things I could seemingly go back to at will, just for sheer entertainment, though as with most such things I finally had read it one too many times and went back one last time to find that it just wasn't really something I could read anymore. It had become part of the furniture of my brain; running my eyes over the words again was just redundant. I've yet to find anything in literature outside of certain poetry that is proof against this effect, likewise in movies, though it's common enough for me to find music that my mind finds seemingly evergreen.

After I'd read Neuromancer the second or third time I bought everything else Gibson had out in paperback, which in 1996 was a disappointingly short list. Still, I loved it all. Further output came at a relatively slow pace, but consistently satisfied, and so new Gibson joined a very short list of things I buy automatically in hardcover upon publication, just to get it sooner.

I ran into inner resistance to this policy with the recent release of his collected nonfiction essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I'd already read most of it, I figured, authorized republication or not, online, during a period when I was stalking him around the internet a bit. And liked it fine but not to the extent of feeling like I had to have it on the shelf. Frugality has had a premium lately, maybe you heard about the economy. Maybe I would wait for it in paperback, or check it out from the library, or maybe just skip it. Then a few days ago I ran across it in a bookstore and something rare occurred: I was seduced by the actual object itself. Just a nice, pretty little hardcover book. A thing that could easily last centuries (I have a 1764 book of German sermons my dad gave me when I got married, which is probably worth, the experts tell me, less than I paid for the new Gibson hardcover - centuries is hardly hyperbole for a well-bound book provided it stays in decent environments). I bought it and I'm glad I did, because I'm getting a kick out of the essays (a different beast than reading the fiction though I'm not totally clear on how), and because it got me thinking about the object of the book again, the construction of the thing, which is interesting.

Books remain a lovely technology, I don't believe they'll ever go away. A nice hardcover is, like a well-produced LP, an affordable little luxury, a piece of utilitarian (if slightly anachronistic) industrial art. Better than an LP, as no equipment is required to enjoy: it will retain its self-contained functionality as long as it retains its physical integrity.

It made me think about a particular relationship I have with books, similar to one I have with a number of things which share the one unique property that I have, at least once, made them from scratch, by hand. A little class I took, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I made a pair of little blank books, the real deal, sewn signatures and carefully assembled boards. It is really the only way you know completely what a thing is, I think, by making it. I dug up one of them (I don't remember what happened to the other one) that I'd given to my wife, it is a charming little thing. It, too, could last centuries, strangely enough.

I took that class under the influence of of another one of my restless sojourns in search of calling. One of those things they tell you to do: take a class.

I've been thinking about making books again, lately, specifically the construction of the book that is pure electronic ephemera. Thinking I perhaps will figure out how these electronic books are put together.

I've been finding myself wondering lately how much play there is in that, the degree to which an eBook can be well (or poorly) assembled. I've related my disappointment in the "free" content in the public domain. I've been digging into this business further now that I downloaded Amazon's free Kindle reader for the Mac. It's the little things: a lot, probably most of it, is basically just a monolithic hunk of linear text. No table of contents, little or no framing art, and what there is bland and cursory and low-fi, anything weird (like Ben Franklin's checklist charts he used to print up to work on ironing out his personal deficits) coming through mangled by formatting conventions (or the lack thereof). And I feel like a dick, complaining about it, because mostly volunteers have extracted this stuff from the highly imperfect output of optical character recognition, and cleaned it up and gotten it into a format that you can't say isn't readable.

But there is at least a somewhat premium product that is possible. I recently forayed into a first experiment at actually purchasing an electronic book, another step on the all-but-inevitable path of buying another gadget. Our friend Mr. Gibson makes another appearance in the narrative: I read in an interview recently that he'd published a short story in a Canadian anthology - a thing he just doesn't do, I've often wished he would write a little short fiction somewhere in the long gaps between the novels. I wanted the story. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to pay $17.21 for the anthology. The anthology is a bit weird, the only apparent binding thread of it being that the authors are all Canadians, I think, and its tagline (Astounding Tales of Tomorrow!) is such a clanging cliché that it you have to assume that it is intentionally so, but why? To what object? What does it mean? The title and cover art are similarly opaque. Maybe after they talked William Gibson into crossing the line into short fiction territory again they decided they didn't have to come up with any other arguments to convince the prospective reader to sign up.

I decided to make an experiment of the compromise of spending a penny less than ten bucks by buying the Kindle edition. The transaction, I have to say, was satisfyingly space age. A handful of clicks and it is there, instantaneously or as near as makes no odds. As with other forms of digital delivery I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the price is the price, there is no shipping and handling surprise at the end of the transaction (please don't start fucking this up with meaningless gotcha fees, oh ye deliverers of digital content).

And so I have my hands (so to speak) on a "premium" eBook, a proper digital edition. It is okay. It has a cover image of decent size and resolution, a table of contents with proper links. I liked the story, it was pretty far off Gibson's beaten path (its closest kinship perhaps with 1981's The Gernsback Continuum"). Ten bucks a steep price at that but maybe I'll like the rest of it if I read it (sitting and reading fiction at the computer just doesn't work very well for me - although the Kindle program makes it work a bit better - despite all the time I spend absorbing text from the internet). I imagine the file is not something I can pull apart and tinker under the hood without breaking some laws but as a showpiece I can at least get some ideas of how it is supposed to work, and how it could work better.

Perhaps, something like affluent book collectors of yore, I will end up ganking "unbound folios" of straight-up text from Gutenberg's files and binding them in my own shop, give them a proper cover and functional contents, pretty them up a bit so they look nice on the virtual shelf.

Still and yet I dream of a better electronic book, a notion of a thing that doesn't exist yet. Somehow purer like the simplicity of a nice binding yet more diverse and functional with all the promise of hypertext, of markup languages and style sheets, like the internet itself. The imaginary thing I thought I was noodling out around the borders of, way back in the 90's with the abortive Kingdom Come Institute (I note that despite my efforts substantial chunks of It's Rome, Baby are succumbing to link rot, truly the center cannot hold).

Perhaps somewhere I generally find a little fraught to engage much I am still pining to make a book in that other sense, the dream of being not just a writer (now that the internet has made that functional verb so meaninglessly accessible to us all) but (dare I say it) a novelist. And I wonder again if the fooling around with various ephemeral electronic wrappers for text is anything but a way to avoid coming to terms with even thinking about the real work of writing a functional book that someone might actually bother to read.

I think about Gibson, again - writing about the earliest stages of his writing, phrases like "try to learn to write fiction" and "trying to figure out how to try," it shows up again in that new short story, "starting to try to write fiction." I think this? Still? I'm forty, for fucks sake. I've only got so much time left to devote to any serious trying, trying to try, trying to learn. I think about a musician I asked for advice about figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this life, who could only say "find out how to find out".

I think about a philosophy professor, gone now, almost 20 years ago, in a class improbably called "The Philosophy of the Literature of Existentialism," a professor who I now know was perceptibly (though none knew it then, I don't know if he did or not) grappling with the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, trying to get at something by saying "when I write my next book" and then breaking to, with surprising emotion, "oh, who am I kidding, I'll never write another book! If any of you have any creative aspirations at all you must leave academia at once! It destroys creativity!" Nervous laughter. I doubt he was playing for laughs. 6 years dead. Nobody left academia. Of course I was studying Science and assumed I was immune to these sorts of dangers.