Stephanie’s Pillowbook

1) Not so long ago I went down to the town centre, when I was still living in my home town, to visit the local library and I ended up buying a couple of books. For 20p each I got George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (which I have somehow never got round to reading before) and Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking - classics both. It always feels like a shady deal - picking off the library’s depleting stock for a pittance. I walk away ashamed. What are they doing selling books? A few years ago I requested Kant’s Critique of Judgement because I needed to consult it. I knew from an old search of the catalogue that one of the libraries in Hertfordshire had a copy. I couldn’t have it now though. Why not, I asked? It appears no-one has taken the book out in the last five years and so it was sold! Its unpopularity does not surprise me - the Critique of Judgement is an extremely hard work to understand. But to sell the only copy in the county because hardly anyone is interested in or capable of reading it! Isn’t it the whole purpose of libraries to store and preserve literature for the benefit of the whole community?

Many of us in Great Britain, lacking a privileged background, managed to get some sort of education thanks to three great institutions now, it would appear, in terminal decline: the grammar school, the BBC, and the public library. I relied very heavily on the latter in particular. So far as music was concerned, then as now my great passion, the shelves in my home town library were packed with Eulenberg miniature scores, almost the entire piano literature, dozens of books on every composer, and hundreds of LPs. It was a splendid collection for a small town and I worked my way through the lot, just about, as a teenager. Now? The scores have gone - packed off to a central, but largely inaccessible, Resource Centre. You can order them, and pay for the privilege - that is, if you can find what you want using the very limited search engine. No one can browse any more as I did when I was young and let their curiosity move them . It is a great shame. The classical LPs were sold off long ago; these days there are just a handful of crossover CDs. In the seventies the music books took up a whole wall; in the noughties the classical section barely fills half a shelf.

That is, of course, the great question facing anyone in a library today: where are the books? Well, we are told that dusty, boring books are not what libraries are about in these exciting times. It’s all information services and meeting places now. Everything must be contemporary and relevant. There are fewer books to read but there are forty shiny new computers for people to send e-mails and download ringtones. It is rather depressing. Can one really make a good case for public money to be spent on providing free-of-charge what is widely available elsewhere? To allow relatively well-off people to browse Amazon and ebay? There should be computers in libraries - particularly for access to catalogues, collections, official documents, journals and so on that aren’t easily accessible to individuals. I just don’t think new library services should come at the expense of books. And they do. The library at home doesn’t have a third of the books it used to stock. What annoys me about the selling-off of books is the philistine motive behind it: that any book not borrowed in a limited period of time is surplus to requirements. To my mind it is those books not wanted by everybody which a library should be stocking - not the latest best-sellers which they now buy in bulk to satisfy a temporary demand. It has reached the level of scandal in some places. Liverpool - the European City of Culture! - notoriously offloaded a large and valuable collection of music books a few years ago for next to nothing.

2) Many people would claim that there is no need for physical libraries anymore because all the information one could ever want is already available online. This claim is, of course, short-sighted and naive. For one thing it rather underestimates the sheer volume of information that actually exists - only a tiny proportion of world literature, for instance, has yet been transferred to digital form. With extension of copyrights and the introduction of DRM mechanisms it’s likely that much will remain either undigitised or inaccessible. What is available is quite inadequate being too often poorly presented and barely edited. One hundred-year-old translations of philosophy texts, for instance, without notes or index and so on, are next to useless, to be honest. That’s not to deny that the internet has provided access to a great deal of material that was formerly rare and difficult to obtain. I now have digital copies of treasures I never expected to see or hear. Nevertheless, there is so much more and it is precisely that which physical libraries should be preserving.

Still, there are some great online libraries. I shall mention just one here, the fabulous resource that is Ubuweb. It truly is one of the most magnificent and rich sites on the internet. Starting out some ten years ago as a space dedicated to various forms of avantgarde poetry - sound poems, visual poems, concrete poems and the like, it has since expanded to cover a great variety of experimental art. I first came across Ubuweb when it was mentioned in The Wire with reference to Aspen, a multimedia magazine published in the 1960s. Each edition of the magazine came in a box containing a booklet of articles, recordings, posters, even film, and was devoted to a particular movement of the time: Pop Art, Fluxus, Psychedelia and so on. The music, to mention just one of the arts, included mostly original pieces by such diverse artists as Alexander Scriabin and John Cage, Yoko Ono and La Monte Young, Bill Evans and Mario Davidovsky. The preservation of Aspen alone would make Ubuweb notable. That is not all, however. To point out a few more things freely available on Ubuweb, almost at random: the films of Situationist Guy Debord, James Joyce reading an extract from Finnegans Wake, the Cornelius Cardew Memorial Concert, Artaud’s Pour finir avec le jugement de dieu, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, the percussion/electronics of Max Neuhaus, the positive plagiarism of The Tape Beatles, Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, etc, etc. And I haven’t even mentioned the collection of essays or the outsider art or the conceptual writing or the ethnopoetics. You really need to wander through their archives yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

3) As for my own library: my books overflow their shelves and are piled up here and there (minimalism is so over). You might be able to detect a certain amount of clumping - most of the Nietzsche books are more or less together here, for instance, and the music books over there - but on the whole it’s just a jumble. I have, therefore, long been keen to catalogue them. Unfortunately, this has always seemed to mean using some database template - and I daresay I am not the only one to give up on having to enter eight or nine fields for every book after doing the first twenty or so. Last year, though, I discovered LibraryThing. Now I can catalogue my books online - just enter the ISBN number and it will search Amazon or the Library of Congress or a large number of University libraries and retrieve all the necessary details. It took me a whole day to do my entire library and another afternoon to make some revisions and add tags. Admittedly, mine is not a large collection - a little under 700 books - but then I sold nearly a thousand back in the late ’90s. Now, of course, a lot of them are boxed up in my parents’ new house. Anyway, one fun result of doing this has been to remind me of some books I really should get around to reading again - although I have also been left to wonder quite why I wasted some much time on others (yes, I am looking at you, Martin bloody Heidegger). Of course, LibraryThing has all the usual Web 2 social things - you can browse other people’s collections, send messages, join groups, add widgets to your blog, subscribe to feeds and so on. There are reviews, recommendations conversations, and statistics to mull over. It has already become as essential to me as Last.fm and flickr. In a word, it’s brilliant. You may browse my library if you wish - and if there is anyone who reads this who is already a member of LibraryThing please let me know, there is nothing I like better than nosing through other people’s shelves!

One of the things the site has to offer is, not surprisingly, various ways of discovering literature based on what you have in your library compared with others. There is also the Unsuggester. You enter the title of a book you’ve read and it comes up with books that are not generally found in the libraries of people who’ve also read the same book as the one you’ve entered. For some reason with every book I’ve tried I get loads and loads of Terry Pratchett! All good fun - up to a point. There’s something depressing about it, though. Take the first of the example unsuggestions: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic. Of course I laughed out loud at that conjunction - but why? Why shouldn’t someone read both? Yes, there is a disparity between the books - one is the greatest work of the Enlightenment and the other is frothy trivia. It would be a mistake to value them the same. But we assume that the same person can’t be interested in German philosophy and shopping. Well, I am, actually! It’s perfectly possible to understand the Transcendental Analytic and squeal over finding the most darling satin slingbacks. Why not? There is a thought-provoking quotation from Michele le Doeuff:

“Imagine a stylish young woman, put her into a Laura Ashley dress or give her the means to dress more expensively; give her also the project of writing the modern equivalent of La Connaissance approchée; for example, a work devoted to the epistemology of superconductivity. In a flowery dress. Is there a discrepancy or not? That is the question.”

There is a notion that to be concerned with serious matters one must be a serious person - all the time. That I blame on Protestantism for it was the sixteenth-century Protestants who introduced, and eventually imposed, the idea that a serious mien, a sober disposition and a constant vigilance over one’s uprightness were prerequisite forms of decent behaviour. Beyond that, of course, to be a man was always considered a serious business. It’s all nonsense. Indeed, I find it suspicious in a person if they have no place for the ephemeral and the non-essential. I suspect their intelligence doesn’t run all that deep. To make a show of being serious indicates a lack of confidence - one is obviously afraid of being caught out. In fact, perpetual seriousness is a giveaway - just as the surest sign of a philistine is their loudly asserting they hate all pop music or all television and the quickest way to spot someone who is uneducated is their unwillingness ever to admit they don’t know the answer to a question. I regard all three as related and infallible means of detecting pretension.