There are two kinds of bad books:  the badly conceived and the badly written.

The former can be insidious, inciting war, genocide, civil unrest, poverty, and more. The past century is a catalog of such writing.

Bad writing can be symptomatic of bad thinking, but usually no one dies as a result. That said, though, the novel I just finished reading almost killed me. I have read countless books in my life, including many bad books and very many badly written books. But I’m thinking that the book I just finished is the worst written book I’ve ever read. And it’s by one of the most popular authors in history:  Stephen King.

More soon about the awful time I spent Under the Dome. I have flagged many pages and I will have much to say about them.

Generally, my Christmas wish list consists of two things:  books and music. This year was no different, and left me with an unforeseen bonanza.

When the presents were unwrapped yesterday, I was left holding three books from my list — The Humbling by Philip Roth, Under the Dome by Stephen King, and Invisible by Paul Auster — as well as a biography of Teddy Roosevelt as our naturalist president (courtesy of my daughter), and the sensational book of this fun little London art project (courtesy of a friend who eerily completely understands my tastes). (The new biography of Churchill was also on my list but didn’t arrive under the tree.)

I also put one music CD on my list, Some Girls by the Rolling Stones.  I’m not a fan of those rolling fellows, but I did remember liking that album, which I had in its original lawsuit version 30 years ago. Because my new car links with my iPhone, allowing the stereo to play whatever music I’ve imported, I’ve been thinking about music I’d like to hear in the car, and recently I thought of this album, which I never bought on CD. So I put it on my list.

The surprise, though, was this:  My friend Trey, who joined us for Christmas, remembered that he had something in the trunk of his car that he wanted to show me. No, it wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa — it was about 300 CDs from his sister, who had successfully  completed importing all her CDs onto iPods or somesuch and was no itching to unload the clutter of cases. She’d given them all to Trey, and he was offering to share them with me:  Have some, burn some into my computers, whatever. So Trey and my son Lex and I spent an hour or two going through CD cases while I cooked Christmas dinner. (Turkey and all the trimmings, so there was plenty of time.)

In the boxes, I found:

• numerous Chemical Brothers CDs
• three Nine Inch Nails CDs
• the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• lots of house and trance music
• Stereolab
• some Brian Eno-produced CDs
• Tool
• Coverdale Page
• Moby
• Radiohead

and lots of other things that interest me. Soon I had towering stacks of CDs that I wanted to put on my laptop for possible transfer to my iPhone. But of course, here’s what happened: Where just an hour before I’d had one new CD, Some Girls, to import and enjoy, now I had, potentially hundreds. One new CD was special, a few would have been novel, but 300 were overwhelming. Worse, they robbed each other of their distinctiveness. By the time I had imported just a few of the CDs, I was looking through to see what to cut:  Suddenly, these R.E.M.disks didn’t look like their finest worksongs, the idea of importing three Nine Inch Nails CDs really made me hurt, and I almost said nevermind to a Nirvana disk I somehow didn’t have. After importing 15 or 20 disks, I looked at what was left and decided I’d pick five — and no more — put them on my laptop, and from there, put what of those I wanted onto my iPhone, and then return to the real world. Because if I didn’t winnow all these down to something manageable, this would wind up becoming another project, and that’s something I don’t need any more of.

So, a couple of hours later, I packed all the CDs back away and was finished with the ordeal of too much new music and was just about to shut down my laptop when I saw one last CD — the one I’d asked for for Christmas. Brand new and almost forgotten. So I imported one more CD, and thought it sounded pretty good.

Yes, I still feel like a fool every morning when my paid-for LA Times arrives carrying news and features first presented five days previous for free online.

Other people have been quicker to act, as this chart of declining circulation shows:

As you can see, in the 20 years that I’ve been reading it, the LA Times has lost fully half its readership. (Through no fault of my own:  Again, I’m the dummy still paying for it.)

There are two kinds of newspapers that continue to prosper and, yes, even grow:  community newspapers and ethnically specific (often foreign-language) papers. And, as witnessed above, there’s the Wall Street Journal, which provides its own example. What characteristic do they all share? They all serve a specific function or niche. Want to know what’s going on in, say, Burbank? Then you might check out The Burbank Times, which recently doubled its page count (and therefore its local coverage) and its distribution. What’s major newspaper in Los Angeles is growing? La Opinion, which serves readers in Spanish.

And then there’s the Times, which mystifyingly for the entire 21 years at least that I have been here has somehow not pursued being the newspaper of record for the entertainment industry. The Times, which first turned its various metro sections into the California section, and then eliminated that section, reducing all “local” coverage into an area easily stored in a matchbox. You can find out some of what’s going on in downtown LA’s City Hall (which is almost entirely irrelevant to many of us) and some of what’s going on in Sacramento, but little about those environs between — including the San Fernando Valley, where I live, population 1.7 million, which is more people than live in 12 different states (Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, and Vermont), each with at least one daily newspaper entirely to itself.

In its zeal to serve a little of everything to everyone, the Times is serving almost nothing to almost no one.

Last night my son Lex and I watched the film version of “The Kite Runner.” When it was over, I asked him what he thought.

“It was okay,” he said.

And he was right:  It was okay.

Except when I read the novel just six months ago, it was a gut-wrenching experience. I even cried. Twice. The tragedy of childhood betrayal and mixed-up identity against the background of poverty and lowered circumstances was breathtaking. As was the palpably new sense of how horrible it would be like to live under the Taliban.

None of that is in the movie.

Well, actually, all of it is in the movie — all of the scenes. In making the adaptation, they didn’t monkey around with the story or the characterizations. There’s only one scene I noticed missing from the book, and I have to agree that it could be cut. (Although given a later scene that’s in the movie, I suspect they shot that earlier one as well.) But what’s left out, somehow, is the impact. Some things just don’t translate to other media.

A notable example:  To get out of Afghanistan when the Russians and then the Taliban movie in, the boy and his father and several others have to be transported across the border in the belly of a fuel tanker. We have that scene in the movie, but there’s no resonance:  The boy gets into the tanker. His father tells him it will be all right. The boy says he can’t breath. To distract him and provide what comfort he can, his father has him turn on the small iridescent light on his wristwatch and recite a poem. Next scene:  They are in India.

This is pretty much the form the scene takes in the novel. Except Khaled Hosseini is able to convey the lingering, choking, searing stench of fuel, and the utter darkness of the tank. Film can’t do smell (although fiction can), and film can’t do darkness (although fiction can). When the boy looks at his watch, we see a closeup of a boy looking at his watch; there’s no context because there’s no way to see deeper in the frame. The novel isn’t limited by frames. The book, a seemingly sightless medium, offers greater vision.

Sadly, I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong in this movie. It just doesn’t make a statement the way the novel does. The impact was lost in translation.

I’ve  thought a lot about translation over the years. I remember reading “Ubu Roi” in French in college and wondering whether it just shouldn’t have been translated into English; no matter how hard one tries, a pun in French doesn’t work in English. (One of Pa Ubu’s recurring outbursts is “Merdre!” which makes a pun of “murder” and “shit.” In English, I’ve seen this translated as “Pschitt!” Which is just “shit” misspelled, and with none of the menace.) I wonder how far off the mark the translations of some of my favorite writers, Kafka and Rilke among them, must be. I remember translating “La Cancatrice Chauve” myself as part of my graduation obligations and wondering just how absurd my translation was. I remember one semester in particular raising the question of translation with several different professors, all of whom gave what amounts to the stock answer:  While a translation is not as good as the original, you usually get a fair amount.

I hope that’s true. And if I had to wait to learn German and Turkish and Spanish and Norwegian, I wouldn’t have read Kafka, Goethe, Kant, Rilke, Orhan Pamuk, Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Knut Hamsun, to name just a few. Still, I would think it’s harder to translate from one language to another than from one medium to another, especially from novel to film, because film exists in the universal language of sight. And yet here we have a powerful, wrenching novel, faithfully translated into a film that, finally, is just okay.

I’ve written here so often about the miserable state of newspapers that I should give the topic its own category. My love of newspapers goes back to the family breakfast table when I was a kid and debates over the news (or, more correctly, my father latest outraged outburst). Later, my first job was with a newspaper (in classifieds, when I was a teenager), and still later I became a reporter and then editor (and later freelancer) at several different papers.

Even with that personal history, though, I still plan to cancel my LA Times subscription. I’ve been planning that for six months now and will soon do it. You’ll see.

We’ve all heard that the internet is killing newspapers. But the way in which it’s been talked about is remarkably similar to the way in which a previous media war was waged:  the one between newspapers and the then-emergent print killer called radio. As a new book points out, what’s interesting is that in both cases, the newspaper people viewed it as a moral war to protect the people.

They didn’t win that first war, and they aren’t winning this new one.

I have to admire The Second Pass. While everyone else (including me) has been compiling lists of books we believe you should read, their contributors have compiled a list of 10 highly regarded novels they want chucked from reading lists and academia.

I am particularly pleased to see “Absalom, Absalom!” on the list. (Which they misname, omitting the all-important exclamation mark from the title.) No, I still haven’t been able to read it. And I’ve been trying for more than 20 years. Similarly, still unsure why its sloppy lazy prose has been so exalted, I felt a frisson of glee at seeing “On the Road” on the list. I’ve seen the ecstasy it spins some people into, but to the rest of us it’s just a bad trip.

I don’t remember “One Hundred Years of Solitude” being as bad or as arrogant as it’s made out to be here. But I read it about 25 years ago, so who can say with authority? I can say that some of the scenes of magic realism that I so enjoyed then — when, for example, a woman simply floats away — now seem to me to be, well, cheats. (In much the same way that most of Dali’s paintings now seem.) But I’d have to reread the book to formulate an informed opinion, and I don’t see that happening.

The title that I think they’re deeply mistaken about is “The Road.” I’ve written about that novel often enough here that I’m not going to go into it again (this link sums it up, and provides links to a few other references here). I’ve read the other Cormac McCarthy books mentioned by Second Pass (“All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing), and they are necessarily different tales told differently. In these books, young men are experiencing the challenges and responsibilities and wonders of adulthood for the first time, and doing it in a foreign land; these books are adventures. “The Road” is told from the opposite point of view:  that of a man desperate to shepherd his eight-year-old son somewhere safe after what appears to be a nuclear holocaust. Like the terrain, like his psyche, the language is accordingly stripped bare. It’s a book with deep resonance, one that sticks deep in the subconscious and leaves readers more aware. At least, that’s how it left me:  feeling far more glad for everything I have, and far more aware of how easily it could all be lost. That’s the power of a truly good novel; complaining about the stripped-down prose seems like beside the point.

I’m sad to see “The Corrections” on this list, though the criticisms enumerated in the essay ring true. To me the novel’s core achievement is in the way the family history is gone over repeatedly from the different points of view of individual family members, until finally the father’s seemingly inexplicable behavior is revealed and with it the extent of sacrifice he has made for his children. That’s the “moving last section” that the critic mentions here. Something else merits mentioning:  Despite all the books flaws, it was tremendous good fun to read. That’s worth noting.

The irony does not escape me that my good friend Mr. Hackney, who (in)famously divested himself of all books for a Kindle and who was discussing this transmogrification with me a mere two weeks ago, has now bought me a book and sent it to me through traditional methods. (Also known as “the mail.”) I suspect, though, that the irony eluded Doug. Further irony:  I already have this book, meaning I now have two copies of it. This is the second time in two weeks that I’ve discovered that I have two copies (different editions) of the same book, both related somehow to comics.  No, Fates, I do not wish to open a comic-book store.

Doug,

Today in a little keyed box down the steps from my office I received a strange object enclosed in a larger, white, sleeve of sorts made out of some mulched tree product (is this paper?). Not knowing with surety what to do with that papery thing, I finally tugged on one end and it opened up. Inside was the other object (image imported on the left), made of a similar substance to the sleeve, except what I take to be the front of it has a wild array of colors. The interior is completely filled with black impressions — words, but they’re not on a screen. And on the first inside paper screen, it looks like your avatar script, but I get the sense that you somehow did this by hand:  “Lee, saw this and thought of you. Enjoy! Doug.” Am I right that this is only on this version of this object? So it’s mass-produced, but individualized, like the inscribed iPods from some years ago? How did you do this? Can you please tell me what tool you used? I would be curious to know.

In any event, what I really want to know is how to use this object.

I don’t see any way to turn it on. I know you’re probably laughing at me now, but I can’t find a slider or depressor anywhere. Knowing you, I thought maybe it was one of the first generation Wavio transmitters the Greater Harmony of Koreachina is developing, but when I waved my hand in front of it it still didn’t turn on. Is this the Kindle Kindle Kindle Spindle I’ve heard about? Again, it’s been long rumored (the thing has been in development for like 12 days now!), and if you’ve actually gotten hold of a K3M, I’m impressed. Whatever it is, how do I turn this on? I’m not worried about the power — because I don’t see any photoelectric cells, I’m assuming like everything else it recharges from background radiation. But I don’t know how to use it. And the colors on the front have really piqued my interest.

I feel honestly dumb to ask these things. And I’m sure the answer is right in front of me. Thank you for sending it to me — but how do I use this thing?

Best,

Lee

p.s. My elderly aunt says it’s a “book.” What is that?

Forget the burning of the library of Alexandria. Right now, we’re losing more information than ever in history, and just as Caesar’s  setting fire to antiquity’s greatest repository of knowledge was accidental, today’s loss is equally unintentional. As a couple of readers have noted here recently, we’re losing art and information to the forward march of technology.

Some examples from my own warehouses of art and information:

• I can’t play my LPs or singles. My wife and I  haven’t had a turntable since at least 1996, when we bought this house. The only reason we had one at the previous house was that my theatre company had an extra one that we used at home to record cues. How many of us have turntables any more? And no, not all of the records that I still have are available on CD, and some never will be. I have the limited edition Deutsche Grammophone boxed set of Roxy Music’s albums (from back when such things had to be ordered through the mail, by sending a letter with a check). The original LP version of the album Manifesto has a wonderful (original) version of “Angel Eyes” that was subsequently remixed into what I’ll call “the hideous disco version” by Bryan Ferry. All subsequent versions of this album include the Hideous Disco Version. I haven’t heard the original version (or, as I like to call it, “the real version”) in almost 15 years. Except I can still hear it in my head.
• I have dozens of cassette tapes that play almost nowhere:  not in my car, not on a computer, not on my iPhone, etc. etc. So in essence, they’ve lost their primary advance:  portability. For most of these, that’s not a problem (the ones I cared about I’ve now got in digital files or on CD). But there are dozens that I recorded myself — of my band, or of discussions with various writers and interview subjects.
• Recently I took a hard look at the 120 or so square 3.25″ hard computer disks in my home office closet. They were formatted for my Apple IIGS, which I used until 1992 when I got my first Mac. I wrote on that computer for five very industrious years — probably 10 or 15 plays, most of them full-length, innumerable essays, short stories, poems, failed novels, detritus, and utter drivel. I hope it’s all printed out and in my files, because I pitched the disks. No way to read them.
• Should I even go into the hundreds of thousands of emails I’ve sent and received, all of them deleted? God knows I’m not saying I should have printed them out and filed them, but surely somewhere in all that there were virtual letters I would have liked to keep for reference in my dotage. As I’ve switched from one email client to another — from the Claris version of Mail to Microsoft Entourage to the Apple version of Mail — I’ve lost one archive after another of this correspondence.
• Same thing with my calendars. I can tell you what I did day to day in the 90’s because I used leather daybooks. My son pointed out to me that the iPhone deletes appointments older than 3 months. (To save memory, no doubt.) They get backed up onto the computer you sync with — but maybe that’ll change too.

I could go on in this vein — and discuss Betamax tapes and VHS tapes and so forth. But let’s talk about those things we never thought we’d lose:  books. One of this blog’s correspondents, my friend the theatre producer Isabel Storey, points out that the shelf life of our archives is geting shorter and shorter:

Each progression of the way we record words seems to make them less permanent. We still have stone tablets dating back thousands of years…paper lasts at least a few hundred…but words stored in electronic devices – do they even really exist anywhere – and will anyone ever remember, find them, even tomorrow?

It’s not just words. (Hence my laundry list above.) But what happens when in our zeal to replace the printed word with the electronic version we toss out too much collective wisdom? I’m referring to this piece in The New Yorker from 1996 concerning Nicholson Baker’s battle with a library that was destroying its card catalog — and its books! — to set up electronic versions. Here’s the abstract of that piece, which has stuck with me all these years:

Baker received an e-mail from a librarian following the move inviting him to “save” the card catalogue. Having ignored an inquiry from the Rochester library, Baker agreed, and made a formal request to inspect the card catalogue. It was denied by Kenneth E. Dowlin, the City Librarian. Baker sued for legal access (Baker v. San Francisco Public Library). He found that there were more books in the cards than in the new on-line catalogue, and realized that San Francisco is a case study of what can happen when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as showplaces for information technology. The S.F.P.L. is now essentially broke, and relies on corporate benefactors. It has sent more than two hundred thousand books to landfills — many of them old, hard to find, out of print, and valuable. The New Main (library)’s shelf space is inadequate. “Weeding” takes place in all libraries in moderation, but the San Francisco librarians had to do it in a sweeping, indiscriminate fashion. The Old Main library has a Discard Room where workers from the Department of Public Works would pick up books to load their trucks. Baker found last copies of old books there. Since January, the book-dumping has ceased, following an expose in the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there are giveaways to the public and to charity. Dowlin will run for president of the American Library Association next year. After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, Dowlin combined departments. Many books were moved to an abandoned building, and damaged. D.P.W. trucks took loads from the library several times a week. Dowlin obtained a large grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs and a new computer system. In 1992, the library signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with Digital Equipment and put its catalogue on-line. In the sixties, City Librarian William Holman amassed books with the ambition of making the S.F.P.L. a high-level research library. Subsequent librarians built on this until Dowlin: “S.F.P.L. is a public library, not a research facility.” He introduced a program of “levelled access,” offering current material supplemented by “focus collections.” In December 1989, William Ramirez, then Chief of the Main Library, wrote a memo objecting to the foreseen change “from a strong reference, research resource and service center to an undistinguished ‘popular library.'” Many of Dowlin’s employees have resisted the change, protecting books by hiding or falsely stamping them. The new book return system damages books, and reshelving is slow. Last May, Baker presented his charges at the invitation of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Librarians’ Guild. In July, a letter from representatives of fund-raising affinity groups went out to every member of the library and staff, attacking Baker for using Holocaust references in his speech. In August, Baker, a historian and two librarians measured the shelves of the Old Main. High preliminary figures were leaked to the press, printed and then retracted. Kathy Page admitted that storage capacity in the New Main was inadequate. Dowlin attacked Baker in the press and called his writing “crap.” The library once kept a “Withdrawal Register,” but there is no record of books discarded or destroyed since 1987. There is a computer file entitled “Purge of Items Declared Withdrawn,” which shows troubling losses. Baker was told that there is “really no need to keep a history” of books that are gone.

Almost 15 years later, this is still painful to read. If something with all the commercial appeal of The Traveling Wilburys’ first CD could go out of print — which it was for almost 10 years, despite four top-ten singles and nine million albums sold in the U.S. and Canada– what chance does a book have of ever reappearing? Yes, books have gone out of print since books were invente, but they weren’t blown aside by the gale force of technology.

For all the wonders of the age of digitization– of which I am an acolyte, from which I make my living, via which I am now sharing this with you — it has carried with it twin unforeseen curses:  the deluge and the drought. The deluge has swamped us with so much information that we now cannot contain, process, or access all of it. (This would be my hundreds of thousands of emails that, had I saved them, I would never have the time to read.) It has been accompanied by a drought that leaves vast trunks of information and content without access to any tributary of support. All we can do is gaze upon the dusty boxes of floppy disks and wonder what might be encoded in them in a language every bit as dead and unknown as the Maya glyphs.

My friend Doug — he of Doug’s Reading List and the only modern explorer any of us will ever know — was in town last week from the lower provinces of Patagonia or wherever his latest trek has taken him. You may recall that Doug, who is a reader for the ages, ejected all his thousands of books several years ago because they couldn’t fit onto a boat or a motorcycle. Now he and his wife, fellow adventurer Stephanie, have invested in a Kindle 2. I have seen the Kindle 2 and admire its functionality. But, as with print newspapers, it has proved difficult to break my addiction. I love books — not just reading them, but holding them and turning their pages and admiring their papery feeling and their floral aroma of decaying pulp. I also like having them on shelves in bookcases throughout my house and my office where I can see them and, let’s admit it, where others can see them. I check out the books in others’ homes and I like to see them checking mine out too.

But now I’m overbooked. Either that, or under-bookcased. All of our eight bookcases at home (one in office, three in kids’ rooms, one in bedroom, three in living room) are overstuffed with books and I pledged to my wife that we were done adding bookcases. And I’ve been unable to purge myself of any of these books because of the painful memory of my senior year in college when I sold my books back to the college bookstore because I needed the money. My favorite professor caught me in the act and said sadly, “Monsieur Wochner, you are selling your books?” It was heartbreaking. And stupid — because over the years I wound up buying most of them again at full price. I now know:  When you’re a playwright, you might have further need some day of “Seven Plays” by Sam Shepard, and books like it. Since then, I’ve lived in fear that the book I part with will be the book I’ll need. Having a Kindle 2 might help with that; my purchases would be digital files on Amazon.com.

But… what if Amazon.com goes out of business in my lifetime?

And what about after my lifetime? I like to think my books will find future readers. Who will read my future digitized Amazon library? Probably no one.

Here’s something that I wonder if having clear bookcases — so I could actually see the spines of the books — might help. Last night I was reading Kafka by Robert Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz. Crumb provides wonderful illustrations to summaries of Kafka’s great works, with introductory-level biographical text by Mairowitz. Recently on this blog, a friend suggested that I get this and read it, and I almost did buy it two weeks ago at my local comics store. Then I stumbled upon it in the last stack of unread books from last summer’s San Diego Comic Con. So I had already bought it and completely forgot. I dived right into it two nights ago and was thoroughly enjoying it and was surprised, given that I’m a fan of both Kafka and Crumb, that I hadn’t already bought it when it first came out, in 2004. As it was, some of it seemed familiar, but I just figured I’d seen chapters in Weirdo or other magazines with Crumb work.

I Tweeted a tiny rave about the book today and resolved to write an appreciation here tonight. In so doing, I Googled for images and found this. First thought:  “Crumb did two books about Kafka? He must be a huge fan!” Second thought: “This is an earlier edition of the same book.”  The cover looked hauntingly familiar. As in, familiar from my bookcases. I went to the “K” section of the first living room bookcase, moved aside two stacks of books, and found “Introducing Kafka” by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb right where I now thought it would be.  The same contents, but in a 1994 First Edition from Kitchen Sink Press. So I’ve now bought and read this book twice (and almost bought it thrice). That’s the downside. The upside:  It’s been a great first read — twice. Because in the 15-year interim I’d forgotten I’d read it.

(By the way, the Introducing Kafka cover  shown here has a slightly different title layout at the top than my first edition, meaning it must be a later edition. Proving that there’s still money to be made in Crumb and Kafka, if not Mairowitz.

End note:  My Google investigations turn up yet another Kafka book illustrated by Robert Crumb and with text by David Zane Mairowitz.  This one is called R. Crumb’s Kafka, “with text by David Zane Mairowitz.” I’m thinking this is the same book. (And given the title, I’m guessing it’s Mr. Mairowitz’s least favorite edition.) The cover is different, but they’re right when they say you can’t judge a book by its cover.

I’m not falling for it again.