I am starting a blog about books—which is to say, I am doing something epically redundant. Because, really, does the world need another book blog? (And, come to think of it, does the world need another writer asking–in a clichéd, rhetorical flourish–whether the world “needs” another of whatever the author is about to claim we have need of? Well, apparently yes, because we shameless scribblers keep doing it.) I find myself in a parlous state for someone with such high ambitions as a writer: Originality, I have none. Interesting things to say–eh, sometimes. Probably the best raw quality I have as a writer is a fair amount of arrogance (sufficient to tumble headlong wherever my babble-loving ears take me), mixed in with a healthy fear of coming off as an ignoramus, as an intellectual inferior to those around me–the latter quality causing me to protectively educate myself on a variety of subjects so that I may, so much as I am able, avoid the public fruition of that fear.

This very powerful, very influential anxiety is experienced, I’m convinced, by people from virtually every walk of life. For example, when I started talking to a woman at work about some books I like, she was very quick to state—as if this were a talismanic expression of her intellectual merits—that she “reads the classics.” We must have very different frames of reference; my rejoinder, had I then inclined to flippancy, would have been, Classics be hanged!–but let me moderate that: I don’t hate books that are considered “classics”, per se—in fact, I love and appreciate many of them. What I object to is the idea that old books can be easily sifted through for a handful of important ones, even as the great mass of non-“classics” can be safely ignored. As my writing quest has drawn me, Ishmael-like, to far corners of the literary seas, I’ve lighted on many strange books and discovered a world of exotic antiquity. I’ve learned that, then as now, there are many gradations in the quality of writing, if not cases where certain writers and works–and parts of works–exhibit certain strengths and weaknesses while at times failing to exhibit others, or–failing that–not even being entirely of even qualities within the work itself. (This is, in keeping with my general worldview, a profoundly ambiguous understanding of old literature.)[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”#E9E11E” class=”” size=”5em”]I wish on my new blog to take the part of a humble appreciator of old books.[/perfectpullquote]

My co-worker, by contrast, seemed to want her reference to “the classics” to foreclose what she may have subliminally feared would be some implicit contest between her level of literacy and mine.[note]To speak fairly of this event: The fact that she used the term “the classics”–a modern shorthand for immensely popular books like Huck Finn, Jane Eyre, Gulliver’s Travels, Shakespeare–is not a definitive proof that she would be unequal to this contest.[/note] And yet, why should it even be a contest? The fact that this insecurity is out there–that I demonstrably have it, and my co-worker has it, and a great many people have it–suggests that fear of intellectual inferiority is a powerful force in our society. It influences our tastes and pretensions, our consumption habits, what we position ourselves as liking in order to impress and relate to other people, which in turn speaks to our ethnic and class identities.[note]For more on this subject, see Pierre Bourdieu’s book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.[/note] Such nervous social positioning can cause certain individuals (like myself) to rebel against the established taste and seek out in an iconoclastic manner what’s strange and dimly remembered, but for the most part the effects of these powerful inclinations is to enforce a social conformity: you read what others are reading, you like what others like, you grow up with an impoverished imagination and a lack of native will, and you do what you’re told and only sometimes question whether it makes sense. Under extreme circumstances, you become a useful idiot for someone with a more forceful personality than your own. (I could name a current example, but political writing is where I am at my most insipid and, armed with that bit of self-awareness, I’ll refrain.)

But rather than presenting myself as an intellectual superior, or an absolute arbiter of “good taste,” I wish on my new blog to take the part of a humble appreciator of old books.[note]But scratch the humble, for there are few modern pretenses I find more pernicious than fake humility; let’s agree to elevate rather than degrade ourselves, and then treat each other in the same way![/note] I do not purpose to push a particular ideological agenda, although some will interpret the alternative approach I adopt to literary commentary (alternative, that is, to the prevailing mode of academic criticism) as in itself an expression of an ideology that reproduces traditional aesthetic values, that denies the unknowability and instability of reality described by postmodern criticism, and that ignores the racial and gender hierarchies that inform the writing of the past. My response to these charges is that I am not indifferent to these concerns and the critiques of preexisting ideologies which inform them; I will, however, resist the tide of contemporary belief which holds these schools of thought to be so important that they needs must monopolize our attention. I’m sorry; I don’t agree. Merely because a concern is newly expressed and (however valid) also fashionable, does not mean that the concern’s novelty should cause it to cannibalize all other concerns. We can talk about these things AND those things; the newborn awareness of one does not mean we drop all conversation of the other; but the one set of understandings can (when used appropriately) be used to augment the other.[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”#E9E11E” class=”” size=”5em”]What I object to is the idea that old books can be easily sifted through for a handful of important ones, even as the great mass of non-“classics” can be safely ignored.[/perfectpullquote]

I will acknowledge that like anyone else, I have environmentally-conditioned biases which have shaped my tastes and inserted speech acts into my speech. To talk about anything is to presume that you have something to say, and to have something to say presupposes you have some position on what it is you are talking about. So if the introduction to a book blog must step in a certain direction if it is to have any motive force behind it at all, I’ll come clean and say I wish this blog to be a step towards the revaluing of that direct love of nature and sensibility which the Romantic poets sought to reclaim in reaction to the formulaic, gentile times of Alexander Pope and his followers (a critique which itself was rather overbroad.)[note]And to be fair, the Romantic Asshole character came in for his own comeuppance in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Dostoyevsky.[/note] I also retain an immense admiration for the Modernist tradition that started with Austen and Flaubert, and culminated in the works of Joyce, Musil, and Mann. I do wish to hold on to that Romantic critique of the 18th century, however, because the world at present is reminiscent of the Augustan Age of the 18th century; it has a surfeit of careerist literateurs, sparkling wits who seek to impress the members of their social circle by a mutual knowledge of secret things, marginalizing those not of that circle by the use of terms incomprehensible to those of other castes.

As for myself (and with the exception of a few friends), I do not have a social circle, a caste that I belong to and feel bound to guard with my words. I feel uncomfortable calling myself a “literary critic,” or a “literateur,” or even a “book reviewer,” for I feel that those terms are loaded up with responsibilities that not every writer on books seeks to fulfill, nor every reader of books wants from those writers on books that they read. I have no wish to hide the amateurity of my mindset and my writing. Such a concealment would be counterproductive, I think, for there is something raw and refreshing about amateurity, the drama of wondering how much of Shakespeare’s drama a high school or college production on Youtube will be able to revivify with their voices, with their bodies. My aim in starting this blog is to revivify for my readers the old books that I, despite what some may term a naive approach literary matters,[note]yet what is this naivete but a failure to prioritize in my writing what the prospective accuser of literary naivete says I should prioritize?[/note] now willfully spend considerable amounts of my time reading. I will revivify these books by appreciating them, which is to say, by describing what they do, how the prose moves and accomplishes certain actions.[note]Whether by intention or by accident, or by those happy accidents which the reaching critic is all too happy to impute to the intentionality of the writer, since, according to the dogma that’s prevailed since the introduction of literary modernism and which has continued into the time of postmodernism, art appreciation is about imputing intentionality to the artist, since after Realism intentionality became the de facto way to judge of an artist’s merits, the description merely of the work product which appears on the page being too obvious and therefore ideologically suspect; obviously, I will be at some pains to avoid falling prey to these contemporary prejudices; they, along with the terminological machinery that facilitates their rote expression, has significantly added to the truly boring nature of much contemporary academic literary criticism–whoa, that was a long aside![/note][note]Additional aside: What is so wrong with long asides? Are they not an accurate expression of the cracquelure of unaccountable complexities which compose reality? Is not all organized, focused writing merely the imposition of arbitrary order on an ambiguous–well, not chaos, not really, for the universe is of such mischievous non-design that even the idea of chaos is thwarted: there is clearly order and disorder, there is clearly–to go back to Plato and the Pre-Socratics–something and nothing–and so even a post-modernist, a Deconstructionist, or a nihilist is invariably going to have difficulty to say something about the world which is absolutely true; whereby I must counsel myself to not pretend to speak the truth, but hope instead to say something interesting.[/note]

The title of my new blog, I have decided, will be the Old Time-y-sounding Old Books Appreciator. Now, appreciate sounds like such an innocuous word. I appreciate the help.—you tell your neighbor. I appreciate that you are concerned about this.—you tell some annoying person you’re trying to brush away. Prior to these casual usages, however, the word appreciate has a meaning of some significance. It means, “To recognize the full value of something,” or even, “to increase in value.” There is at present then a need for an old book appreciator, because the full value of old books is not at present being recognized, and therefore opportunities—for enjoyment, for enrichment (both of the mind and the wallet) are being wasted by a general buying (and reading) public that does not yet understand the vast inheritance which lies unspent in the vaults of their old literature.

When it comes to old books, there is much interesting I can say; I can talk about the historical, biographical, and literary contexts that inspired their authors. I can characterize in some detail the attitude and cadence of the words on the page. And, where the intrinsic interest flags–and if you want to be, like Hazlitt, a critic of boundless readability, you need this–I can make out the difference with many of my readers with purposeless passion-flights of pithy prose, Thomas Browne-ian verbal substitutions, Dostoyevskian repetitions, the zeugmatic stabs of a Lyly, of a Charlotte Brontë; and can also point these things out in the old texts I read, and comment on their effects on readers as we hear them, whatever “comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men.”[note]William Hazlitt, “On Poetry in General”: “for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for any thing else.”[/note] My approach is to observe and to notice; if the grand design of a writer makes itself apparent to me in the process of such noticing, I will be happy to describe my conjecture, but I prefer to allow such designs to present themselves to me within the text, rather than engaging in the fashion of the day, which is to impose a theoretical framework on works by an author who never heard half the words that the critic, primed to promiscuously apply them, thinks are relevant. I say this not to disclaim the past hundred years of English literary criticism, nor the interpretive frameworks that many learned critics have developed. I merely think that a text needs to be appreciated as art and rhetoric before it is read as a platform for ludicrous pontifications about ahistorically-handled issues by an academic fabulist.[note]I’m thinking, of course, of your proverbial “X 19th-century author was a closet homosexual, and I can prove it!” essay. Please stop.[/note]

Aside from those dubious qualifications, I can also honestly account myself a hopeless bookworm, “a scholarly recluse who lives among and for his great library” to quote a back-flap description of Peter Kien, the protagonist of the novel Auto-da-Fé by my Nobel Prize in Literature laureate cousin, Elias Canetti.[note]My mother says that description very humorously resembles me.[/note] In addition to the thousands of books in my physical library (including many fine antique, leatherbound editions), I have thousands of additional books in my virtual library of organized Favorites lists touching hundreds of authors from every region of Europe from ancient times to the present. I do also venture upon a modern book from time to time, whenever the appetite strikes me. Forsooth, I have no shortage of necessaries on my bookshelves to furnish a constant churn of content for this blog, save for the most tragic one of Time; alas, I will most certainly enter the grave before ever I summit this mountain of text.