I've been thinking about reading and books lately. Thanks to Steve McQueen. The American actor known for his king of cool persona and slick 60s action movies never read scripts or, in fact, rarely read anything. As Quentin Tarantino notes in his book Cinema Speculation, McQueen was the most reliable actor in the 60s and seldom faltered in his movie selection. His wife Neile read the scripts and picked the ones that best fit McQueen. He only ever read car magazines. If you watch his movies, you'll notice that he has sparse dialogue and that a lot of the story unfolds through long shots of him thinking and making decisions. He was a virtuoso visual storyteller, and I wonder how much the lack of reading contributed to that.
What's the point of reading a book anyway? I barely ever read a book between the ages of eight and twelve. I exclusively read every article on the sports page of the daily newspaper and every Tintin comic ever published. At the age of 13, I wrote my first short story, inspired by Tintin. Surprisingly, my English teachers loved it and published it in the school magazine. My father was so taken by it that he accused me of plagiarizing it. He kept asking me where and who I had copied the story from - another writer? The smart kid in school who got straight A's in everything? It seemed cruel then, but with time I've come to realize that he just hated that I could do something he could not, that too without "working hard ."I started reading books after that incident - to prove that I, too, could work hard and read tragic prose about poor Russian people or whatever. Maybe this was a mistake - the original sin that has clouded my thinking ever since. I should have Steve Mcqueened through life.
There is a bookstore that is a perfect 26-minute walk away from me. I've been stopping there on my long walks. I've made a habit of lingering around the New and Noteworthy section. The books in this section keep changing, but the themes and patterns remain the same. There are always two types of war books - one about an old conflict and one about the latest conflict. There has been a new and noteworthy book about the Russia-Ukraine war every 3 months since the war started. There are no books in this section about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so Ukraine remains the latest conflict in the book publishing world.
The middle shelf has a book about the current mental illness (It is anxiety if you did not know). Two years ago, it was trauma and Body Keeps Score. In between those years were several books about attachment theory and relationships.
There is always a book that is instantly recognizable as Latin American from the motif used on the cover - lucha libre mask, bright colors, swirling lines, and inevitable reviews that read "magical" and "capturing the pain of the American dream." Anything written by a non-American, non-European author is pervasively labeled magical. I suppose everything outside your own lived experience is truly magical.
It is an affront to the spirit of Steve McQueen that actors insist on publishing their biographies these days, and it's never the ones you want to read about. I saw one by a guy named John Stamos, who I've been informed starred in a sitcom in the 90s. I imagine if someone wakes up one day with the question, "Gee, I wonder what being a B-list actor in the 90s was like", they have an answer in this book. The romance books in this section are written by someone named Sarah or Emily or something. It's never a Mohammed Yunus or Sachin Benny.
The books that recently became critically acclaimed movies sell well. That section is now occupied by Pervical Everett's Erasure, adapted into the movie American Fiction. The irony is that the story is a satire of the book publishing industry. The movie (I never read the book in Steve McQueen fashion) is about Monk, a black writer who is upset and enraged about the types of stories, particularly about black people, that get published. A large part of the movie pits the protagonist Monk against Sintara, who Monk views as a writer pandering to the worst impulses of the publishing industry. There is a scene towards the end of the movie where Monk finally meets Sintara and finds out that she is a thoughtful, formidable person and not the hack that he expected her to be. It's the moment when Monk realizes that neither he nor Sintara has power over the types of stories that are in demand. Talking about this, the director Cord Jefferson says (emphasis mine):
"There's one thing Sintara points out in this scene that was a real growth moment in my journey as a creative person. I used to be a guy who was like, "Why does this person get to make this art? This art is stupid and hacky, and it offends me not only that they're allowed to make it, but that they're getting paid exorbitant sums to do it." Then one day I woke up and realized something that forever changed the way I look at art. People like Sintara are making art in a series of systems and institutions that have been around since before she was born. The work she's making is reflective of the parameters that have been put around her and artists like her. So asking why artists make specific kinds of art is actually asking a small question. The bigger and more important question is this: why are the people who greenlight art so interested in paying for the same kinds of art over and over again? Why are they so interested in telling the same stories year after year, century after century?"
I suspect books weren't this item that was fetishized back in the 60s, back when Steve McQueen was reading car magazines and churning out hit movie after movie. But now, the artifact of the book is content in itself, regardless of what is in it. It's a $15 purchase to assure the hyperreal hardened that their college education was useful. The best seller labels and superfluous adjective-laden reviews assure you that you are reading the right thing, tapping into the intellectual current driving the world forward. Noting this same phenomenon, Sam Kriss writes in his excellent review of Walter Isacson's Elon Musk biography:
"I wonder how long this kind of book has existed. I think maybe fifty years: about as long as Elon Musk. Before then, there might have been things written down, printers and binders who arranged those words in a codex, and a public that read it, but there wasn't The Book, this very specific consumer item tied to its very specific function. You can imagine that codices of printed words were once part of the general texture of life in the same way that the touch screen is invisible and omnipresent now. You didn't expect anything in particular from them; you looked at them because you didn't really have any choice. You weren't proud of yourself for reading books instead of doing something else. Only a postliterate age could give us The Book. Books are, in a sense, the opposite of reading."
So, really, what's the point of reading a book? Recently, I was sad when German Footballer Franz Beckenbauer passed away. I never watched him play (he had retired by the time I was born), but during every World Cup in the 2000s, Beckenbauer used to write a column in the Indian English daily The Hindu. It was the first thing I read every morning, and I got nothing out of it other than a little joy. I'll likely remember it longer than I remember anything new and noteworthy.
programming note: newsletter will be on a short break next week, back again the week after
Agreed! Seems like fetishization of any product or medium is an expression of nostalgia towards something past its peak. No one valorizes things that are live, unfolding and in the zeitgeist. In this vein, the contemporary treatment of books must indicate that it's a dated medium at this point, more of a totem of charm and sophistication than something to engage with. Something you self consciously picture yourself holding by a fireplace in a wood house (Airbnb).