Monday, February 18, 2008

Right around chapter four of It’s Fark it occurred to me that the real writing wasn’t on the page, but on the wall itself: this reading kick is over. Mark Twain’s autobiography followed it down the return chute shortly after because, witty barbs aside, by and large it was a crotchety old dude telling me how time was. It felt uncomfortable, like volunteering at a nursing home where a kindly little Englishwoman named Adelaide grabs your right ass cheek instead of the proffered arm, all the way to the elevator. Hey-o!

But it’s the medium itself, rather than the content, that ultimately ended the read-a-thon. You get media by stealing, renting, buying, or borrowing it. Book piracy amounts to photocopying or printing 450 pages from a pilfered eBook. And I don’t even know if you can rent a book. Now, I’d purchase The Matrix in a heartbeat because, even after the twentieth viewing, what if Neo doesn’t know kung-fu? You can never be too sure. On the other hand, as good as Confederacy of Dunces was, I probably won’t read it again.

This narrows it down to borrowing, which seems to work on paper. When you borrow a DVD from someone, you aren’t constantly reminded of its lender. With a library book, it’s not just you and the text, it’s you and the dozens of other people who have read the text. I’m not talking about germs here, though some books clearly appear to have been dropped in the toilet, so much as hidden shopping lists, forgotten bookmarks, and, probably worst of all, incisive commentary written in the margins on every other page for Mrs. Goldfarb’s third period English class. Stuff like “childhood” or “humor” scrawled in bubbly pencil to highlight the key points in Twain’s life. William Safire it ain’t.