Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
160
Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
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Overview
An exuberant, expansive cataloging of the intimate physical relationship between a reader and a book
A way to leave a trace of us, who we were or wanted to be, what we read and could imagine, what we did and what we left for you.
Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers.
Letter to a Future Lover collects several dozen brief pieces written in response to library ephemera—with "library" defined broadly, ranging from university institutions to friends' shelves, from a seed library to a KGB prison library—and addressed to readers past, present, and future. Through these witty, idiosyncratic essays, Ander Monson reflects on the human need to catalog, preserve, and annotate; the private and public pleasures of reading; the nature of libraries; and how the self can be formed through reading and writing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555973384 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Ander Monson is the author of Vanishing Point, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments. He edits DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona.
Read an Excerpt
Letter to a Future Lover
Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
By Ander Monson
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 Ander MonsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-338-4
CHAPTER 1
A
is an arbitrary place to start, I know, my hand inside a book, my heart inside a book, this one Pierce Butler's Books and Libraries in Wartime (1945), not checked out since its last returning sixty-eight years ago. To run a finger along this page is to consult a reading record and to caress the past. I address the past with this list of lovelinesses, things I found in libraries over years. Years are threats that libraries oppose, even if eventually it's necessary to weed the stacks: we can't keep everything forever.
Sixty-eight years without a reader! More than the duration of a life for many (especially during war), still it isn't so much, reader, in geologic time. (What is a moraine but a tectonic collection?) Yet still it speaks. What do libraries mean in wartime? What do they mean when we are not at war? We are currently at war, even if it's easy to forget our foreign complications unless someone we love is over there. The names of those beloved and how they felt and smelled to us become a constant hum that soundtracks our days until they are returned on a designated date, also like a book. A book is taken out. Perhaps it is read. Then it is returned. Or in some cases it just rests on a reader's bookshelf unremembered. Or maybe the last patron died of dehydration with this book in hand and it was placed aside respectfully when she was found, and it was cleaned and deemed relevant enough to return it these decades later, so only a week ago it made it back, thus explaining the long lapse in our attentions to its contents. Instead it was loved and read each night, maybe because it documented a tiny story, say that of the makeshift Vilna ghetto library under German occupation, one that might otherwise be forgotten beneath all the other stories if the patron did not reread it each night. To archive is political. To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone. It will all be gone in time. Maybe this is the best we can do.
In this place of preservation, it's not hard to be reminded of those we've lost or fear we might, those who were due but never came. A librarian's conversation, a spine-cracked paperback, a human hair, a whiff of sandalwood in air: each of these might disappear for a year or more and fold the past into the present and pound a nail through the intersection. Patron, in this way we're young again; we remember; we're alive.
AI
Might as well be the start of something artful, an entry point or an attempt to open. I don't just mean the poet Ai though you could try her too, from beyond or from a book, where what is left of her now resides after she passed. Maybe I mean the maned sloth, found only on the eastern edge of Brazil, which takes its name from sin and is ill-branded for the future. It's on a slow boat there with its tufts of fur and its disdain for our accelerated lives. These sloths "rarely descend from the trees because, when on a level surface, they are unable to stand and walk, only being able to drag themselves along with their front legs and claws. They travel to the ground only to defecate or to move between trees when they cannot do so through the branches. The sloth's main defenses are to stay still and to lash out with its formidable claws." I quote from Wikipedia because, like the ai, I prefer to stay still and lash out with my formidable claws. Oh, that is obviously a lie. I have claws but will not stay still for long. By trying to I hope to learn something new. The ai's habitat is constantly under threat.
Maybe you already know that a book is an artificial intelligence, designed to be tried on and played obsessively like a software subroutine, a difficult first-person shooter scene, or a favorite song you've listened to too long. You're here because you liked its eyes, the way it dots them with hearts in handwritten notes from years ago. Try it on for size. Ideally you found this AI in a library, its natural habitat, an ideal vehicle for speaking to the future, even if it is under threat. But everything is threatened in this age. It's as if nothing can shine or mean unless we threaten it with axes, with budget cuts, with obsolescence, with oblivion.
You should know this is not the only version of the book. First, it snuck in under others' covers, a little at a time. I sent these essays into the world inside books I found and spent an hour or more inside. Some of these were subsequently reprinted, bound or loose, in magazines. Then it was in a box, unordered, unbound, big and pretty and fancy in a limited edition. I liked that fine.
Here you'll find it too, the book, the book about the book, and those who give over our homes and lives to books and share their habitats. These are only in an order because binding makes it so: alphabetical is arbitrary. It also leaves an odor. Read the entries in whichever way you like. Be slothful and go straight through, claws extended, or stay still and hope the world will come to you. I'd start with
"How to Read a Book," myself, if I didn't already know how to navigate these things. Use it as you would any of its class. Adjust it like a sextant. Let it open up a seam in you like Anne Sexton. Discard—or not—when finished, like a former lover's breath, like a pdf.
for a certain sort of reader, isn't it? To know there is a list like this is to want to penetrate it deeply, to understand its depths and pockmarked passages, to need to see where they lead eventually. So what if I know I cannot get to all of them? To know that they are sorted there, that they are there for me if I choose to follow is perhaps enough. But surely some have gone extinct, are sacrosanct, private, inaccessible, classified, destroyed, closed, hidden, erased, or otherwise beyond my means.
Knowing an infinity is there and unknowable (for that is what an infinity is, unknowable, unfathomable, though we try to hold it in the word ITL∞ITL, we know that wall won't hold it long) is sublime; it lets a bit of air into the mind. Still it's a lovely list, a laundry list of possibilities, of libraries buried in laundries, as it suggests. If you've been to one in search of cleaning you may have noticed they contain magazines on tables or in a crate, perhaps the occasional book. Read, deposit one, or take one home. It's a song that plays whether you partake or do not. Likewise those embedded in hotels and B&Bs, for instance the former Days Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I like to stay when I'm in town, with its shelf of cheapo paperbacks, a trail of reading material left behind by those who came before, wherein I find a way to pass an hour that doesn't involve the Law & Order television blare.
I venerate you for your generosity, former patron, even if you did not mean to lend or leave this book and thought that you packed or discarded it or just forgot. I venerate you too, who cleaned the rooms and gathered books for the collection. These are here for our protection. With too much time alone who knows what compartment of ourselves we might discover? Better to fill it with another's words. I venerate the gods of randomness whose altars these collections are. Maybe it's enough to take a book and read a couple of pages and give it back. Or perhaps you will take a title home. Perhaps you've discarded it when you were done and what I find is not evidence of a randomly selected group but one woman's leavings, her trail of readings.
BURN THIS FIRST / UNISON DEVICE
Over coffee one afternoon in the summer of 2001, András reminded me of another way to burn books, explained to him by a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. "This forces one to think critically," András remembered his friend saying. "One must prioritize. First, you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?"
—Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History
If you are in duress, burn this first. I give you my permission. My position is that this is disposable, like electronic text, like ticker tape, track for news of stocks, the earliest digital electronic communications medium. The first invention Edison sold, his "Electrical Printing Instrument," was patented November 9, 1869. It was not the first stock printer, though Edison's remains the best known. 1867 saw E. A. Calahan's first machine. 1871 introduced the "Unison Device," which would "stop the type-wheels of all the printing-instruments in a circuit at a given point, so that they will all print alike when in operation"—which would bring all the tickers on a network into unison, so that information would synchronize and propa gate. There's that moment in which what seemed like chaos is no longer, and things align, a structure's found. Impossible, perhaps, to overstate how significant this concept was: networked machines, distributing simultaneous information a century before the Internet.
So read this once then secret it away for the next to troll these pages: this is meant for obsolescence. Maybe these sentences are already obsolete. But in a pinch it can be burned. This is not a sacred text, unlike the Quran, the word of God, which "does not include instructions for its own disposal," and should be buried, erased, or stored indefinitely; alternately, "desanctify the book by removing the text from its pages. Some medieval scholars recommend wiping off the ink and disposing of the paper by ordinary means. A more modern and practical alternative is to tie the book to a stone, then drop it into a stream to symbolically achieve the same effect" (these quotes via Slate.com, and for all I know (the scholar sighs (these eddies within eddies)) the article might already have disappeared). Sacred Jewish texts should be placed into a repository to await mass burial. Though a Bible has no built-in disposal ritual, and thus it can be burned, one should generally avoid burning sacred books because of fire's association with the devil and the underworld.
While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life? Reread that book you disliked in ninth grade and see how it sings to you now: you understand the story differently because your own has changed. To celebrate your growth, throw yourself a ticker tape parade for and of your disposed-of books—confettied by clouds of shredded pages, call yourself a nebula of assorted information. In bits they are much easier to burn, though the flame won't last as long.
Though we call it that, we haven't used ticker tape in ticker tape parades for years: now it's all confetti, shredded financial documents shotgunned out in clouds over Broadway as whoever passes now for heroes processes below. For the last ticker tape parade, 2012, celebrating the New York Giants' Super Bowl win, a half-ton of confetti was distributed in twenty-five-pound bags to the buildings all along its route.
What else we drop: calls, balls, 7 in handheld smartphone games, in certain cases walls, ceilings filled with secrets we stashed as adolescents above the chewy tile: all of these literally, even how we say "literally" now, meaning its opposite, metaphorically, trying to redirect our attention to the figure of speech, to refresh and amp it up.
I hope you are lucky enough not to have to burn your books for fire or food. Reading networks sentences, memes them, beams them between brains in surprising ways: what's kept, what's stuck there, what's lodged in a cul-de-sac after the rest has left. It's like a game, a labyrinth. Everything in time becomes a trivium—in the latter half of the twentieth century, "knowledge that is nice to have but not essential"—originally trivium referred to one of the three topics of basic education (grammar, logic, rhetoric), though now it's for those inclined to marginalia, cultural crud that cakes the brain, knowledge acquired at random, obsessively, used in games like Pursuit or in game shows, or to impress those you meet at parties, papering over your lack of actual classical learning like a defiant shot across the bow of those who tried to educate you. Your meanders in the shredded trenches of Wikipedia minutiae and rarely visited library stacks have to pay off eventually. They will, won't they? Please say they will. If we say these words out loud together, we will be as one, in unison, synchronized with this device, the page.
CONTENTS MAY HAVE SETTLED DURING SHIPPING
It's as if the books in the library are just books with nothing in them except more books.
—Lucy Corin, "Library," One Hundred Apocalypses and other Apocalypses
What I can't comprehend is endlessness. The lives of saints. The horrors they endured to be so deemed. How they gleam in our remaining light before the candle gutters and is extinguished and instead we have the dark. How items packed by weight, not volume, settle during shipping and become a tangled bundle. The spaces between things—books, call numbers, thoughts of love and death. How they're reconfigured by our constant jostling. In this way things settle and will gradually fuse. These jumbles of disconnect become our memories, solid as a rack. I mean a rock. I mean a brackish pond, a murk, how a solid-seeming thing becomes a wash. We soothe them over time, wear them down with use, make them smooth with all the ways we adjust to make them fit our narratives. Oh, that's what that loaded moment meant. That one awkward pause in a conversation that comes to mind a decade later: only now do we understand attraction, our predilections for misinterpretation and our own reactions to being adored and not noticing it for years: how the idea of starlight as history frightens us.
The more I visit libraries the more I find myself opening up to them. There are so many passages in these labyrinths that it's impossible to see them all or to note their passing. Better to settle for the few I can find my way to wend through for a year or two. Some libraries are dying. A few I've seen are filled with wind (no, not the Wind of Change, as the Scorpions remind, but an air-conditioned breeze that reminds us this place needs tending to, in order to remain in its condition). Others are contracting, transforming, weeding books, adding more security, offering more machines for our use, rebooting with coffee shops and apps or fishing poles (like the Honeoye Public Library) or libraries of people (as in the Human Library, which offers people on loan to converse with). Or idiosyncratic ones like the Little Free Library tucked with children's books just down your street. Another is established as a subset of a public library and curates books from the larger set. One pops up for a week in a vacation town. You can do this yourself if you are crafty and don't mind a little risk: take the books that mean the most to you and set them on an empty shelf. Now label it. Add a note about who you are and what you're here for if the books you choose do not reveal enough. Then leave it, hope it will become a home to someone searching for reminder that our intelligence is good for something besides depression.
Finally that is what we love: human taint, human constraint. Not infinity but the best a man can grasp. (Is it sad that the television echoes back Gillette?) What a woman makes of or takes away from all these years and words, what she writes, what she returns, what she retains. Every essay suggests a new direction I might wander in the next, another space to aggregate and think about, another chamber in which to spend my hours, a currency that becomes more apparent as I age. Each book in which you lose yourself equals ten thousand you will not have time to read. See how your time spent in front of screen replaces your time in front of page? I'm not judging. I love my Xbox too, my Xanax too, my Xerox too, my xeriscaping too. (I am hopeful that we are coming to the end of lawns: a colossal water waste, our hours of pointless grooming.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Letter to a Future Lover by Ander Monson. Copyright © 2015 Ander Monson. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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