The stories of bookstores, as special and delightful as they may seem, like most stories, are actually sad ones. Nevertheless, to quote from the X files motto: “The truth is out there”… in that immense forest of books… fragmentary, perhaps… yet organic; and if we were to radicalize our relationship with books just a little, we would know, in an instant, that it was always the most dialectical relationship of our lives, one which synthesized our very beings… and put us into a constant state of melancholy…
One could build an entire set of aesthetics around such melancholy, with all the elements of Kant’s triad of the beautiful, the sublime and the monstrous. However, it’s more important to critically analyse and understand the idea of loss inherent in these stories – the loss of stories never published, the loss of shelves containing certain kinds of literature, the loss of smaller book spaces, the loss of languages, dialects, the loss of tiny alcoves and nests for lovers of books, the loss of browsing, the loss of book keepers…
The necessary loss and failure here is structural – a permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works, however misleading the empirical complexity of the situation might look, however more expansive, this new world of books might look behind our bright virtual screens. To repeat Sherry Turkle’s pun, we “take things at their interface value” and there is an ambiguity here, which threatens to keep us away from the truth.
Here’s another story about books which I often revisit. Neruda writes in his Memoirs, “It took me thirty years to collect a large library. My shelves held incunabula and other books I treasured: first editions of Quevedo, Cervantes, Laforgue, Rimbaud… letters and manuscripts of Rimbaud, Paul Eluard and others… there were many such treasures coveted by the Bibliotheque National in Paris and by Chicago’s voracious book collectors… one day I gave away the wonderful collection of my sea shells and the five thousand volumes of books I had selected with so much love to my country’s university. Any genuine person will imagine the rejoicing with which this gift of mine must have been received. But an official critic wrote some furious articles protesting vehemently. When will it be possible to stop international communism? He raved. Some parliamentarians protested as well. Between them, the writers of the articles and the parliamentarians launched an icy wave over the small world of Chile. Incidentally, twenty years have gone by and no one has ever seen my books or my shells again. It’s as if they had slipped back into the bookstores and the ocean.”
It is now upto you, dear reader, to dig out the pearl from ‘The bookstores and the ocean’…
Cover image ‘The Chandelier’ by MIKE STILKEY(www.mikestilkey.com)
Los Angeles native Mike Stilkey has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. Using a mix of ink, coloured pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as internationally, at galleries and museums such as the Bristol City Museum in the UK, LeBasse Projects in Culver City, CA, Kinsey/DesForges Gallery in Culver City, CA, David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, CO, Gilman Contemporary Gallery, Ketchum, ID, and Rice University Gallery, Houston, TX. He has also created numerous large-scale installations internationally, in Turin, Italy; Bern, Switzerland; and Hong Kong and Beijing, China.
