On Hoarding (Cont.)

 

 

It's the annual Oak Park Library Book Fair this (hot) weekend. Packed with people, most of whom the ones that donated books. I spotted a few of my donations, like The Design of Cities by Edmund Bacon--which I bought used in the 1980s. And as I was browsing The Book of Virtues by William Bennett someone said "that's my donation".

Are readers essentially knowledge hoarders? Or does the idea of having books make us seem more knowledgeable? Sometimes we pretend to have read books.

Earlier this year I did a riff on idea-hoarding after listening to a Paul McCartney interview in which he was saying that even though he has thousands of ideas recorded in a journal, he still writes songs more spontaneously. If you do it long enough, the spontaneous ideas resemble other ideas that you saved. What's happening is that you are drawing from wisdom--that is in the creative arts a style or a usual way of working. It's what you always do when you write. For me it's a guitar that's nearby, or a bass, so all the ideas are generated in the moment with the characteristics of those instruments.

Lately, I've also been donating vinyl records, even the ones that have deeply influenced me. I don't necessarily need totems of my influences because it works like books do: once I've imbibed them, or connected them in some way, I don't need the objects.

I've been anti-object since around the 2020 lock-down when I felt I didn't want to create any more large physical art pieces because they begin to become more stuff.

In terms of interacting with books, the object itself may become less important, and the hands-off interaction with the information without the object becoming the usual way we "read". (I both like and hate this idea). 

What we want is to go to a "Reading Room" every day as we would a cafe. This is perhaps a good application for VR: reading where you can be immersed in a book "cinematically" for 15-30 minutes and not have to own a physical copy. This could be an encoding experience as well with the memories of toothsome foods connected with books. ("Madeleine Moments") We know this as a "library" but the library experience can be virtual and decentralized and will be more of a "headspace".

The other thing I was thinking about is the cumulative interactive time that exists in a book. If a book takes 3 years to write and edit and if there are 10,000 books at the Fair, that's almost the history of humanity. Book fairs are an exercise in contemplating the epochal. And would the floor hold all those tons of books and people?

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[8/7/2025: Streaming resolved the issue of downloading copies, but the issue is now an overwhelming number of options, especially with film and video. Perhaps if we had a small physical library of films, we’d choose to watch those first because we valued them enough to have a copy. But that’s not what happens. Consider a library with stacks of books. How many people browse through stacks anymore? I think it’s useful to just browse through the spines of books to find something interesting, which could have been published 25 years ago. Looking at spines is the book equivalent of scrolling, but the choice is easier because you are limited by the number of books you can carry. The equivalent of going to a theater to see a movie is actually doing that. The equivalent in music is going to a record store and buying albums and sitting around listening to them without distraction].