`No Boiled-Down Canon of Anything'

We hope to feature video interviews with researchers and students on the school web site, so on Tuesday I attended a two-hour “crash course” in video production. The instructor, born during the second Reagan administration, had a less-than-decisive grasp of certain technical matters, among other things. In response to a question about, I believe, XLR mic inputs, he replied, “That part of the book is not a pleasure to read at all.” His honesty and critical acumen floored me: Haven’t we all felt that way, even in the middle of a book we might otherwise enjoy?

No doubt a computer engineer somewhere is working on a self-editing book: Input your dislikes and preferences – smut or no smut, short words or long, funny and/or gloomy – and software removes all passages “not a pleasure to read at all.” Imagine Moby-Dick without the boring stuff about whales, and King Lear rid of that tiresome old man.

An old-fashioned school of thought maintains that a text is sacred, that we must take the good with the less good, and so forth. A typical exponent of this sentiment is Charles Lamb, in “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” from Essays of Elia:

“I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

“In this catalogue of books which are no books—biblia a-biblia—I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which `no gentleman’s library should be without:’ the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley’s Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.”

Is this open-mindedness or does it represent biblio-gluttony, an unhealthy appetite for the written word? A possible answer lies in another book I have been enjoying – Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, by Joel Smith, published in conjunction with the Steinberg show running through Feb. 24 at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. When Steinberg resolved to like a book, his liking was anything but casual. In 1986-87, the artist crafted “Library,” a wooden table and shelves holding blocks of wood embellished with titles, author names and illustrations. Smith writes:

“The selection of titles adds up to no boiled-down canon of anything, except Steinberg’s idiosyncrasy. [As any self-respecting personal library should.] One sees, in cross-section, the gentle chaos of a lifetime’s book-gathering – library as biography.

“Some of Steinberg’s perpetual rereads are here (Tolstoy, Herzen, Flaubert, Saint-Simon), along with traces of his youth (Dostoevsky and Verne in Romanian translation, Kipling and London in Italian, the 1939 Larousse), cherished offbeat classics (Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria, Aleksandr Kuprin’s prostitution expose The Pit, Richard Hughes’ In Hazard), some books by real-life friends (Aldo Buzzi, Ennio Flaiano), and a few fetish-objects, such as the thin local telephone directories Steinberg brought home from his travels.”

Elsewhere, Buzzi has described his old friend as “an artist…who drew instead of writing.” Smith thoughtfully records the 53 titles in Steinberg’s wooden catalogue, including Buber, Chekhov’s “Peasants,” Celine, a Creole grammar, Robinson Crusoe, Gogol’s “Nose,” Ovid’s Tristia, Stendhal, Svevo’s Las Coscienza di Zeno, Tacitus – and a slender volume with “Nabokov” on the spine. Steinberg and Nabokov, fellow exiles, remained friends for 30 years, until the Russian’s death in 1977. In 1947, according to the chronology appended to Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, Smith writes:

“Nabokov will become a friend, and Steinberg will reread his study Nikolai Gogol (1944) countless times, treating it as a guide to the labyrinthine twists of his own imagination.”