I didn’t think I would like Click and Clone

Or get anything out of. For one, it has all the markings of the referential, post-post whatever poetry that really turns some people on. Poems set to movie stills of movies I haven’t seen, poems written by reading over people’s shoulders, poems that place one-or-two word lines together with no conjunction, i.e. “Heartbeat- / flipbook. / Clonebooth.” You know what I’m talking about. The kind of poetry that serves as a punchline on late-night TV shows.

But never judge a book by its cover, or a poet by her (or his) line lengths. There are several poems in Elaine Equi’s Click and Clone that I read three or four times – because I enjoyed them, not because I didn’t get them. “Sight Unseen,” “A Woman of the Wrong Altitude, “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” “To Eddy Poe,” “#1 The Terror,” to name a few.

Take “The Libraries Didn’t Burn,” a poem that’s (somewhat) about how the internet age has changed how most Americans read: “the locket of bookish love / still opens and shuts,” she writes:

But its words have migrated

to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —

a somewhere in between.

Here, Equi puts together the truest description of internet reading that I’ve come across so far, that “luminous elsewhere” of the computer screen that engenders the “somewhere in between” of skimming information instead of listening to or reading it. I doubt that I am alone in having to make a conscious decision now to read a whole article instead of just scrolling through the highlights.

It’s all part of Equi’s larger design, though – to try to understand how art has changed in the digital age. And changed it has, she thinks. In the 20th century, James Schuyler “could say: ‘A cardinal enchants me with its song’ and get away with it,” she writes in “Reading Schuyler.” But now, in the 21st? Birds “shit on sentiment / and refuse to ornament / our lawns” (“Canceled Flight”). The Romantic’s nightingale “pauses midsong / for a very, very long time.”

There’s a sense here that nature, which used to be a source of beauty (and truth, to be Keatsian), isn’t sufficient inspiration for poets of the computer age. “Homer invoked Athena,” she says:

Sappho — Aphrodite

Milton — the Holy Spirit

Hopkins — the Virgin Mary;

I wonder who I can get to help?

Because humans, too, have changed. We’re “fin-de-siecle” ghosts,” never permanently anyplace, never permanently ourselves – always part Facebook, part cellphone, part Twitter, part blogger. In one of my personal favorites of this collection, “Sight Unseen,” Equi talks about the ancient symbol of the eye as a way into a person’s soul “seems corny” to us, who live in a world where “everyone has had to become so skilled / as a performer.”

I could go on with these quotes, detailing how “art is the simpleton,” but I’ve gone on long enough to get to my point. In an age of texting and digital skimming, the best gift you can give another person, writer or other, is your full attention. Elaine Equi well deserves it.

The Paperback Reactionary

If the e-readers do take over, and the paperback and hardcover both go the way of the scroll, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman, will be as moving a eulogy as any to what’s lost – to the physicality of the book as we know it, to its scent, its feel, its habitats, its history.

Not that the essays that comprise Ex Libris aren’t at all somber. Generally, they’re  wry, and often hilarious (though perhaps just to bibliophiles). But they celebrate the tactile nature of the paper and ink of books that e-readers are prophesied to displace. Essays like ‘The Literary Glutton,” where Fadiman’s son eats a book, and  “Secondhand Prose,” where Fadiman expounds on the joys of the “smears, smudges, [and] underlinings” of used books, are impossible to imagine about a computer screen.

Which isn’t to say that e-readers won’t be the future. They probably will: who sends letters anymore? In time, the e-readers might gather their own cults and paeans – but while the paperback is dying (oh I hope it’s not!) it’s nice to read Ex Libris and think, yes, there was something special here.

“A Botch”: Thoughts About A Past Pulitzer-Winning Novel

Despite his instrumental roll in publishing A Confederacy of Dunces (as well as a glowing forward), Walker Percy wasn’t all that complementary to Dunces in his private correspondence. “Toole’s book is in many ways a botch,” he wrote to his friend, Shelby Foote, “but is he ever loaded.”

And I think I get where Percy’s coming from. As far as I can figure out, the central conflict of Dunces, underneath its load of hilarity, is between that “fat freak” Ignatius and his mother. Throughout the book, Ignatius cannot imagine why his mother is upset with him, despite a) using up all her money on his education and b) treating her like a servant while he watches, and berates, TV all day. Consequently, his mom pushes him to find a job, and it’s the consequences of these jobs that culminate in Ignatius growing up a little. Not only does he finally get out of mom’s house (albeit under threat of the insane asylum), but, for the first time in the book, he actually experiences some sort of empathy for another human being, his sometime pseudo-girlfriend, Myrna: “He stared gratefully at the back of Myrna’s head, at the pigtail that swung innocently at his knee. Gratefully….Taking the pigtail in one of his paws, he pressed it warmly to his wet mustache.”

So I’d argue that, through the course of Dunces, Ignatius goes from self-centered to, at least once, other-centered; from fear to freedom, from his mother’s house to New York. That’s the central movement, the raison-d’être of Dunces – the story I think that Toole wanted to tell, but buried underneath gargantuan hilarity and multiple plot strands. Not exactly “a botch,” I’d argue – more unfinished or unfocused. That makes it all the more of a shame that Toole couldn’t hack it, couldn’t handle writing another book (or having Dunces rejected), and committed suicide (as is the case with such things) way too soon.

As Foote wrote in an earlier letter to Percy, “My main reaction (as I guess it was everyone’s) was a deep regret that he didn’t survive to push all that talent in the direction he was headed. If he’d ever have gotten all that hilarity under control he’d have done some wonderful work on down the years. Too bad.”

Too bad, indeed.