All the words ever written

On being absorbed by books

By Reilly Capps

A version of this Book Report ran in the Telluride Daily Planet, April 4, 2013

An astonishing fact: at least 10 percent of all the photographs ever taken were taken last year. The figure has to be similar for “all the words ever written,” no? On top of all the books and articles, you have Twitter, Facebook, text, email, wordy tattoos and sext captions.

Which is great. A miracle. No one need live a life of quiet desperation, not when there is Tumblr.

Yet, we are not necessary in the golden age of literature, just as the world's fattest man does not also win the Nobel Prize. It's overwhelming. When I click on Facebook, I feel like I’m being waterboarded.

I have a lot of very dear and very illiterate friends, sweet friends so illiterate they regularly poison themselves because they misread prescription drug labels, who would sign contracts with an “X” except they never got that far in the alphabet, whose inability to decipher road signs means they’re constantly ramming into highway buttresses -- and whose status updates are the length of a book they believe is called “Mopy Dick.”

With all these Facebookers -- people you know and love -- constantly recommending Panda videos, promoting their high score on a Zynga pyramid scheme or “liking” things that are clearly signs of the apocalypse, you forget about books. Books are still good, but books have bad PR. Books sit quietly, like forgotten Dutch masterpieces in a dingy wing of an art gallery -- you have to put in some effort; you have to go find them.

The following are three books that lifted me up, as in a hot air balloon, away from the flashing lights of our convenience store world to reveal a little bit of the horizon ... which is an image I stole from Pico Iyer, who wrote:

"The Man Within My Head" -- 4.7 out of 5

Let’s say you loved the Grateful Dead. Your life bottomed out when Jerry died. Your only solace nowadays, aside from the old bootlegs, is Phish. Phish is pretty good. And when Phish covers the Dead, you are nearly paralyzed with pleasure, reveling in two levels of greatness -- the original Deady greatness, and the newer Phishy greatness, magnifying and interpreting Jerry’s work.Me, I love Graham Greene. If the author had gone on tour, I would have dropped acid and danced in circles while he read from “The Quiet American.” I would have rutted behind the Port-a-Potties while Greene, on stage, recited “Our Man in Havana.”

Greene is dead. Now, there’s Pico Iyer. Iyer is to Greene as Phish is to the Dead: not the same thing, not a follower, not an acolyte or an imitation, but somehow kin or comrades. Maybe the best thing since.

“The Man Within My Head” could be described as Iyer “covering” Greene. It’s not a biography, it’s an exploration of Iyer’s love for and connection with Greene. Iyer’s essential question is: ”How one can feel closer to someone one's never met than to those one's known all one's life? Why do I feel he understands me as nobody I've met in my life can do?”

"A Hologram for the King," by Dave Eggers -- 4.79

A story has to heat up as it goes along, increasing in tension and meaning. It has to end well. Eggers, a master, starts this book moving as slowly as an hourglass: a salesman waits in the Saudi desert for a meeting with King Abdullah. And, you know: so what? Who cares if some sad sack meets some jerk monarch? And yet you will need to know. And that need to know draws you into a wider, deeper, more important story, one that illuminates a lot about the world we live in now.

"The Last Policeman," by Ben Winters -- 4.2

A comet, sure to kill us all, renders life pointless. Yet one detective in a small town is determined to investigate one particular case, an apparent suicide. Why? What is the point of solving a case if a meteor is going to kill us all? It’s a great question on which to base a book, since it’s the essential question of life.

What is the point of life, if we’re all just going to die? The point is probably to love deeply and laugh loudly and dance like nobody’s looking, or whatever’s written on that inspirational poster hanging in your aunt’s kitchen.

Epictetus says that the point of life is to be a spectator of God and God’s works, and not only a spectator but an interpreter. If that’s true, how best to spectate? What should we be looking at?

Pico Iyer, at least, likes to look at books. In an article in the L.A. Times, he writes about the difference between reading online vs. reading a book. Reading online is great, he writes. “But I also felt, as I logged off, a little as I did when I worked four blocks from Times Square: wildly stimulated, excitingly up-to-the-moment, alive with ideas — and with no time or space to hear myself think. Then I picked up a novel … when I looked up from my reading, I’d forgotten what time it was, my self and my life seemed much larger — and it was as if I’d stepped out of a traffic-jammed car on the 405 at 5 p.m. on a Friday and into a deep forest rich with secrets."

Iyer describes happiness as “absorption.” Facebook is pure distraction. You look at a lot, but what do you really see?

A guide to the real world

The perils and rewards of ‘reality'

By Reilly Capps
The Book Report

[A version of this column was published Wednesday, October 10, 2012, in the Telluride Daily Planet]

In late summer, you click through the channels, you click through the Internet, searching for something to Occupy Your Brain, just like the entire rest of the year. But you forget — late summer is a wasteland that never entertains. TV is all repeats, late-night hosts vacay, not even the Tweeters are pumping out Tweets and the only sport going is something boring called “baseball,” which is static in stirrups, white noise in tights. If it’s America’s game, we should all move to France.

As a last resort, facing the prospect of falling into a coma or, worse, interacting with loved ones, you lazily pick up ...

... a book.

Younger readers screening these words on their Google Goggles will need a tutorial on “books.” A “book” is a bound series of “pages.” Each page resembles a Facebook “page,” except book pages are made of paper, on which ink has been “printed” to create a “story,” often filled with “meaning” or “thought.” Here’s a helpful analogy: You have tattoos, right? Dozens? Printed with ink? On your face? Good. Think of a book as a dead tree with tattoos.

Books are available at that coffee shop on main street. No, really. Did you ever notice those tall, square, multi-colored things that line the room you walk through to get coffee? They’re not just for insulation. Those are books!

Now, reading a “book” will require sustained focus. But, like other activities that improve focus, such as meditation and ritalin-snorting, you’ll find that it’s worth it. Many books are interesting! Others, such as “War and Peace,” are mostly handy for killing spiders.

But wait, there’s more! “Books” are just one small part of a larger world that is separate from the world of TV and the Internet, a world known as “reality.” If you’re new at reality — and I’m only an occasional visitor — an excellent tutorial is ...

“America Off-Line: The Complete Outernet Starter Kit,” by A.J. Jacobs — 4.5 out of 5

 
Jacobs teaches you how to unplug from the Internet and have a look at real life — the Outernet. This book came along in 1996, during the height of the craze for America On-Line, when alarmists were worried that our lives would become consumed by the Internet. Ha! Ha ha! Ha. How wrong they were. Now that we and our pictures and memories and jokes are all wholly owned subsidiaries of Facebook, Inc, Jacobs’s insights into “reality” are even more current. The author bio informs us that Jacobs “has been interested in reality for several years now.”

The list of “real-world” alternatives to the world of the Internet is staggering. For instance, did you know that pens can be used for more than just pushing that little “restart” button on the back of your WiFi router? It’s true! You can do “word processing” with them. You can even do it in the sun in a park! How’s that for versatility? Plus, “Reality boasts a full-color palette with millions of hues and an astounding pixel density,” Jacobs informs us. “(If you want even more clarity, you can upgrade with glasses or contacts.)”

Jacobs can even help you make sense of “books,” which are sometimes difficult to decipher. Jacobs instructs: “America Off-Line writers rarely — if ever — use emoticons. You’re supposed to infer his or her meaning using such intimidating-sounding concepts as context, tone and style. Let’s see how this works, using a text line from one of America Off-Line’s finest authors, Charles Dickens.

It was the best of times.

It was the worst of time.

Could you figure out Dickens’s intent? That right:

It was the best of times :)

It was the worst of times :(

There’s more:

And yes I said yes I will Yes :) — James Joyce, Ulysses

Jesus wept :( — The Bible

Elementary, my dear Watson ;) — Sherlock Holmes”

And on and on like this. It’s a terrific book, and short! Maybe a couple thousand Tweets long.

I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for reality. The Internet has advantages over real life. You can fall in love over the Internet, but you can’t really get your heart broken. You can’t get crushed by an avalanche unless it’s an avalanche of junk mail. In reality, the sun can burn your skin. In reality, you have to exercise. Jacob’s most recent book, just released, is …

“Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection,” — 4.2 

In it, he addressees the unfortunate fact that, in reality, with your body, it takes more than just downloading the latest “software update” to keep your hardware working properly. It takes eating right and exercising. In this book, Jacobs sets out to become the healthiest person in the world.

This “book” is written in the style of Jacobs’s other, more famous books: “The Know It All,” about Jacobs’s attempt to become the smartest person in the world by reading the encyclopedia, and “The Year of Living Biblically,” in which he follows every rule of the Bible to the letter, remain the standards for the genre. But, with “Drop Dead Healthy,” Jacobs has lost a little heat on his fastball. Jacobs is a nebbishy writer committed to staying that way — fitness is not exactly in his wheelhouse. It feels like his main goal was fulfilling his book contract.

In any case, for Jacobs and the rest of us, exercise is probably too overwhelming. It’s probably better to stick with staring at screens. Nothing can hurt you there, no quest can go wrong. The penalty for failure is low. I’ll see you online.

Best month ever

By Reilly Capps

[From the Telluride Daily Planet, December 2009]

Some months, everything goes right. Jordan in the 1992 NBA playoffs, Keroack with his "On the Road" scroll, Walter Morrison when he invented the Frisbee. And me, this month, reading books. I picked up astounding book after mind-blowing book, old stuff and new stuff fell into my lap, and I read 'em fast, feeling like stout Cortez when he first stared at the Pacific.

 

"Tinsel," by Hank Stuever -- 4.65 out of 5 

Wonderful, 100,000 words lit up and blinking like Christmas lights on a suburban tract house. Alternately moving and sober, the world's first totally honest Christmas book. ("Scroogenomics"? Sensationalist Haterade.) Stuever, of the Washington Post, dissects three Christmases in Frisco, a booming suburb of Dallas, and sees all the cheap plastic crap, how Santa lives in China now, how "often Frisco is a world of cheerful zombies who move among containers (home, mall, car) as if in a narcissistic family-first and property-values haze." Stuever is my buddy, and he told me that he wanted to call the book "Christmas is at Our Throats Again." Which is a great title but too harsh, because this book is tender, too, and Stuever is one of the rare East Coast writers who doesn't look down on ordinary folks, probably because he comes from Oklahoma City, the most ordinary-folks place in America. Most Americans live in OKC-style suburbs, but few people write about them very well, because they're boring ... but Stuever is the poet laureate of suburban loneliness. Here, he shows how suburbanites don't much paint or sculpt, so they express themselves by decorating and putting up Christmas lights and going to church and buying stuff. And giving away that stuff at Christmas is how they say I Love You. 

"Up in the Air," by Walter Kirn -- 4.75

Kirn is a ninja word warrior describing our Mountain West flyover country, from the Momos in SLC to the "dontchaknow" Eskimos of the north to the suburban cowboys of Denver, and leaves the overanalyzed New Yorkers to their Roths and Lethems and all those other motherless Brooklynites. This book has morphed into a movie (premiered in Telluride) staring Clooney and directed by the guy who did "Thank You for Smoking" and "Juno," but if that movie tops this book I'll gulp down a cowpie smoothie. It's about a guy striving for one million frequent flyer miles, which will earn him lunch with the airline CEO, a lunch he'll use to complain about the bad service. "The miles I'll give to charity," he wants to say to the CEO, "in the hope some sick child will come vigorously of age and knife you in the street for pocket change."

"Downtown Owl," by Chuck Klosterman -- 4.5

America's best critic writes a novel and proves he understands rural towns as well as he understands KISS and "Saved by the Bell." 

"Outliers," by Malcolm Gladwell -- 3.9

He seems right about everything, and so pithy you can boil his bestsellers down to three words each: Trends are unpredictable ("The Tipping Point"). Make decisions fast ("Blink"). And, here: Practice, work, succeed. 

"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold," by John le Carré -- 4.79

Best spy novel I've ever read. 

"Our Man in Havana," by Graham Greene -- 4.87

Correction: this is the best spy novel I've ever read. Why is it so much harder to praise a good book than rip a bad one? A flaw in human nautre or in the English language? Or do we overuse superlatives these days, so that "amazing" and "unbelievable" are used to describe bran muffins and Levi's and are therefore stripped of their ability to describe truly transcendent things like this book? My solution: make up a word that means what amazing used to. So, therefore, this book was gromping. Gromping good. In the same way "The Quiet American" explained Vietnam before it happened, this explained the Cold War before it happened, and even, in my mind, Iraq. Mr. Wormold inventing missile launchers out of the schematics for a vacuum cleaner isn't much different from Colin Powell describing phantom anthrax labs at the U.N. This book shows it was only partly Powell's fault. There was Chalabi and all those other charlatans, who, like Wormold, feed the CIA lies in order to get U.S. gov't paychecks as informants. A grompingly stunning insight.

"The Time Machine," by H.G. Wells -- 4.8

 
My grandpa Lyman, born so poor he incubated in a cabin's wood burning stove, hauled a book with him everywhere, and thereby died so great they named a room at the Harvard law library after him. I'm dumber, lazier and more forgetful, which means I only occasionally have a book with me. But from now on I will, thanks to the iPhone. "The Time Machine" was downloaded and read in fragments whenever I had no physical book or newspaper handy: at a dentist's office filled with People, during an awful opening act, during a Lift 9 breakdown. So, listen, Luddites: you can hate the Kindle and the Nook and all the e-books, but they're the future, and you better get used to it. They mean you're never without material, which is a miracle as great as the time machine in this boom-bang book written by a master.

 
-- Reilly Capps writes the Riled Up column at Pondaray.com/blog. He travels a lot, but is in Telluride right now, probably at the book store, where they have most of these books.

Books are holy

By Reilly Capps

[A version of this ran in the Telluride Daily Planet on Aug. 23, 2012.]

Last year, I decided to go to Iraq. For fun. Due to a recent misunderstanding between our two countries, I didn't know whether I'd be greeted with a handshake or a hail of bullets.

In point of fact, when I arrived, one of the kindest and most hospitable families I have ever met took me into their house and let me couchsurf with them, and it wasn't handshakes; it was hugs all around.

The son, 22, was as modern and Western as an iPad. He had traveled to Colorado, knew Jay-Z, and studied business. But his father was a more traditional man, a turban-wearing, polygamist Mullah who controlled his own militia. Years before, the Mullah had ordered the murder of his own brother because, it was said, his brother had violated the tenets of the Koran, which must have made family reunions awkward.

Like a lot of things about Iraq, this story confused me, especially the motivation. The Koran endorses fratricide? The (totally-modern) son said that yes, in a way, it did. But he said that if I read the Koran, I'd understand everything, and I promised him I would. A mere ten months later, I finally fulfilled my promise, and finished ...

"The Koran," translated by George Sale -- 1 out of 5

... and I still don't understand.

I mean, according to the Koran, Muslims are definitely supposed to kill those who stray from the faith, and so I guess I understand why the Mullah, who loves God above all things, had his brother whacked.

What I don't understand is why I'm alive. "When ye encounter the unbelievers," the Koran says, "strike off their heads." Yet when the Mullah -- and lots of other Iraqis -- encountered this unbeliever, they took me out for pizza and laughs and protected me from the chaos of Iraq, and left my head exactly where my mama put it. Why?

That's a question for smarter people, and anyway this is a column about books, not religion. So, as a piece of literature, how is the Koran? Not great. For starters, the Koran lacks the three fundamental ingredients of a good book: story, characters, and good prose. Though it's supposed to have a pleasant rhyming pattern in Arabic, in translation it's lifeless and dull, with few arresting metaphors or clever turns of phrase. If the Koran was, in fact, written by God -- and I have to believe it was; the Koran commands Muslims to kill anyone who doesn't believe that -- then God is not the world's greatest writer. I mean, God is not exactly Hemingway.

And if I can slip into my own preacher's robe, I want to say that, yes, the Koran is holy, but all books are holy insofar as they make you feel something or help you to know the mind of the author, if not the mind of God. In fact, if I had never been told (by the Koran) that the Koran was the holiest book of all time, and revealed unrivaled depths of the human condition, I might think that other books beat it on that score. In fact, if you handed me the Koran, and a book like, say ...

"Super Sad True Love Story," by Gary Shteyngart -- 4.78

... and asked me which one was more divinely inspired, which traveled deeper into the very nature of the universe, I'd have picked "Super Sad True Love Story," not a question in my mind. It does what the best novels do, which is use fiction to tell a kind of truth.

Lots of reviewers have said that it's a funny book, but most book reviewers don't have any sense of humor -- that's why they're inside reading books instead of out getting laid. This book is almost entirely sad, even if it makes you laugh once in a while. It tells you love is a crucible. Love is a vice. Don't let Hallmark tell you different.

It's set in a ridiculous American future where we're all retail and media obsessed, outfitted in slutty clothes, oversharing on the Internet, indebted to China, ruled by a smiling, spying government that is actually just the shadow cast by business over society. You know: next Tuesday.

It's also about the holiness of books. The hero, Lenny, 39, worships books, and packs his tiny apartment with them, while his love, Eunice, 24, only scans her smartphone for data and images. But they connect, during a power outage, over a few passages from Milan Kundera, read by candle light. Her head on his chest, her breathing slows, and he thinks she's asleep. But she's not. She's listening. And Eunice's momentary absorbtion in "The Incredible Lightness of Being," in the holy words flowing over her, is one of many magic moments in this miracle of a book. If you have to choose between reading this book or reading the Koran, wait for the movie version of the Koran.

Last month, I also finished three other holy books ... "How I Became a Famous Novelist," by Steve Hely -- 4.71 ...  "The Big Short," by Michael Lewis -- 4.5 out of 5 ...  and (most of) ..."Integral Spirituality," by Ken Wilber -- 3 out of 5.  All holy, all good. 

This month, I'm reading the new (holy) A.J. Jacobs stunt book and an old (holy) Graham Greene novel, and not a single book that, holy or not, can get me killed if I give it a bad review.

My downhill slide

Using books to arrest my decline 

THE BOOK REPORT 

By Reilly Capps 

[A version of this was printed in the Telluride Daily Planet, Aug. 2, 2012]

Like a female Olympic gymnast, I peaked at 19. I had a new computer, my own place, and a hairline much more proximate to my eyebrows. Since then: all downhill. No one my age should have so much trouble returning emails or spooning beans into his face without dribbling. If I were a racehorse, I'd have been shot. 

In an effort to slow the descent, I found myself reading self-help books last month. This is not always the torture you might think. There was: 

"Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity," by Joel Stein -- 4.76 

I'm trying to grow up. Stein, since he had a son, is trying to be a man. Which is a great goal, as long as he doesn't lose his wonderfully juvenile sense of humor. Because while humorists like Sedaris and Hornby and Fischer might be deeper than Stein, Stein produces more laughs per page than any journalist since Dave Barry.

 For example: "As you can tell by the quality of our wines, Jews are not that into drinking. But even for a Jew, I am a bad drinker. In 24 years of trying, I don't have one positive story about alcohol. Not one 'remember that time we got wasted and built that school in Haiti?'" And: "Feeling like I need to show some enthusiasm over (my father-in-law's) tools, I asked Ken what each of them does. I'm not really listening until he says that some tools are for fixing tools. When I asked if he has any tools to fix the tools that fix the tools, he looks at me like I am an idiot." And: "Despite years of my insistence to the contrary, it seems that masturbation really isn't great exercise." Two of Stein's greatest weapons are the slightly unexpected word choice and a certain edgy crudeness. The perfect example is when he gets a dog, and his dog sniffs another dog's rear, and Stein says his dog is getting "smelled out." That's an unexpected phrase that's totally funny. At least if, like me, you have a 13-year-old sense of humor. And still haven't grown up.  

Books like this have to have a central message, a quest, a movement from one thing to another. (I know. I just wrote one, about my year sleeping on the couches of strangers, now titled "Sofa So Good.") Stein seems to know that he's supposed to communicate arc and character development, and he tries, but I don't always buy it. To be honest, I don't really care. I'll forgive any book anything if it's funny. 

"The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business," by Charles Duhigg -- 4.8 

I'm trying to cut out some of my terrible habits, such as binge drinking while gangsta rapping to small children. To that end, this book literally changed my life. Duhigg helped me understand how and why my brain gets stuck in "habit loops," and it has helped me start to work my way out of them. Years ago, I was lucky enough to have a couple beers with Duhigg, and he was about the only guy I've ever gotten tipsy with and talked about game theory. He broke open the Foxconn story. He's one of the few people to have interviewed Neal Blue. And while he's cranking amazing newspaper pieces he wrote this elegant, deep, remarkable book. Read this one if you're half as monkey-brained as I am. 

“Life's Operating Manual," by Tom Shadyac -- 3.4 out of 5 

 I picked up this book at Mountainfilm. If you read it -- and I know that you did -- you saw that it's not really an operating manual for life, as it doesn't contain fish taco recipes or advice on how to buy a used car. It does offer concrete information about how it feels to make $60 million directing Jim Carrey movies while living in a 17,000 square-foot mansion. Shadyac reports that it doesn't feel fantastic. (Supervising domestic staff proves particularly problematic.) Which will come as a huge surprise, unless you've read "Gatsby" or watched VH1's "True Hollywood Story" or heard the words of Biggie Smalls. Things have perked up for Shadyac since he stopped making millions making people laugh and started chilling in T-ride. Which puts me and you, dear underachieving reader, one step ahead of him, since we skipped getting rich and famous and just chilled here from the get-go. 

Overall, Shadyac is adorably earnest, repeating truisms that you simply can't repeat often enough: stuff doesn't make you happy, experience does; we are not separate, we are all connected; love is what makes life work. These simple truths have a hard time finding their way into books, because there's not much money to be made in telling them. He tries to back them up with science, drawing brief sketches of complicated ideas like the “tyranny of agriculture” or “spooky action at a distance.” After that, Shadyac tries to Suplex those esoteric ideas and beat them into the shape of everyday ideas. Finally they come to resemble the oldest, simplest truths. Shadyac looks at chemistry tells us: “You are brothers and sisters with all of creation." He looks at biology and says: “Who you are is love." Shadyac is not mistaken. This book may not be life's operating manual. But it might be a nice mission statement. 

Me? I'm trying to be more creative. I sometimes wished Shadyac showed greater reverence for his creative art. It's fascinating to hear how he creates. “I have never thought of a good idea in my life,” he writes. “I have received many.” I could have read a whole book on that. I also think Shadyac worries too much about being overpaid. In the country of Lloyd Blankfein, Snooki and Josh McDaniels, Shadyac isn't even one of the top 10,000 most overpaid. Thankfully, to help me think about creativity, there was … 

"Imagine: How Creativity Works," by Jonah Lehrer -- 4 

Creativity, Lehrer notes, isn't a solitary thing. Geniuses arrive in sets, like surf waves: Epicurus/Socrates/Democritus; Michelangelo/Raphael/Donatello/Leonardo; Beatles/Stones/Dylan; Jobs/Gates/Andreessen. So, the lesson is: move to 1982 Palo Alto. Failing that: work in teams; be collaborative; accept criticism. And don't worry about what you are creating. Let yourself go. "We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all, the silence of the scared imagination," Lehrer writes. 

None of us will ever be as butt-kicking as Duhigg, as funny as Stein, as insightful as Lehrer, or as Christian mystic-y as Shadyac. But a few more months of reading like this and maybe we won't be put down like Secretariat. Maybe we'll be put out to pasture. Maybe we'll be allowed to stud.