we read now. Price takes divided atten-
tion for a virtue, and practically invites
a reader to keep a device nearby to flesh
out her examples. Almost every piece
of data has its own story to tell. Per-
haps more than any genre, nonfiction
has been changed by the Internet, which
turns a biography or a history book into
a series of fascinating leads. Every reader
brings her own curiosity to the printed
text, and builds her own customized
version out of adjacent or supplemen-
tal research. Read a biography of James
Merrill, for example, and you might
find yourself online learning about
Wagner’s operas or looking on Zillow
for the value of the poet’s properties in
Key West or Athens.
The book I finished when I finished
Price’s book will not look like the one
you buy or borrow. Nor is this some-
thing entirely new. Though books have
been mythologized as the one “non-
database” in a world of searchable con-
tent, readers have always “skipped and
skimmed” books, as Price points out, or
rearranged them mentally, or composed
their own tailored indexes for fast in-
formation retrieval. It is not unheard of
to break a book’s binding and reorder
its pages. I have a Latin lexicon from
the seventeenth century, once owned by
a clergyman. He essentially built his
own search engine in it, affixing home-
made calfskin tabs to its pages to mark
the entries he consulted the most. An-
other copy of that book, with tabs in
other spots, would be a different book.
When a book sits next to the In-
ternet, its authority as the final word
on anything is automatically under-
mined. With a few keystrokes, I found
out that Hemingway’s copy of “Ul-
ysses” may have been used more ex-
tensively than Price suggests. (A 2014
scholarly paper by John Beall, avail-
able as a PDF, finds that, on the basis
of the number of cut pages in his copy,
Hemingway “probably read well over
two-thirds” of the book.) Price’s drive
to make her book as current as possi-
ble—she marks the date of its com-
pletion as “late in 2018”—suggests that
its nature is also to be quickly super-
seded, like a Farmers’ Almanac.
Her radiant descriptions of the
physical properties of books, the fo-
rensic traces—from smudges to can-
dle wax—of earlier bodies holding
them, immediately sent me to the In-
ternet, where I viewed, up close, papal
indulgences printed by Gutenberg and
the first vegetarian cookbook in En-
glish, “Vegetable Cookery,” from 1833.
The Internet excels at images of print,
so vivid they feel tangible. Where the
print object is too rare or fragile to be
seen in person, in such detail, the effect
is profound.T
hroughout Price’s book, I thought
of Emily Dickinson, whose hand-
written poems, sometimes inscribed on
scavenged paper, have suffered so much
by being printed and bound. To under-
stand the power of those poems, you
have to see Dickinson’s script (like “fos-
sil bird-tracks” across the white of the
page, as the author and minister Thomas
Wentworth Higginson put it). Dickin-
son resisted publication, perhaps be-
cause it was synonymous with print,
which renders every space and every
dash, no matter its handwritten span,
as the same conventional length. The
online Emily Dickinson archive fixes
that problem, and allows you to zoom
in so tightly that you can often make
out threads of the paper fibre in the
office stationery she sometimes used.
Even when you see an original Dickin-
son manuscript under a magnifying glass,
you cannot come that close.
A printed book might scant the ma-
teriality of a page—like Dickinson’s—
or it might come off as all too material,
too static. Much of the best contem-
porary poetry, in our era of easily and
freely shared video, begins as perfor-
mance and quickly goes viral. Often, a
poem’s “original,” whatever we mean by
that word, isn’t a text at all, and where
the printed text is merely an aftermath
of an event (a transcript, for example,
of oral performance), the advantages
of a screen feel decisive. This is one
of the thrills of new poetry, but it also
takes us right back to the origins of
the art, to the special conditions of oral
performance, when rhyme and meter
were, in part, mnemonic devices, ways
of making unique experiences memo-
rable and transferrable: an early form
of social media.
Price’s synoptic, all-of-the-above ap-
proach suggests that our concept of
“reading” has been curiously narrowed
at a moment when it should have broad-ened. Nostalgia—for the hammock, for
the rattan rocker on the porch—colors
everyone’s judgment of how we should
be reading. It’s like the “Twilight Zone”
episode in which Burgess Meredith,
playing a harried bank teller, emerges
from the vault to find that the world
has been destroyed by a nuclear war.
He’s despondent until he stumbles upon
the ruins of a library, where he sits down
amid the rubble and opens a leather-
bound tome. “Time enough at last,” he
exclaims—and then his glasses slip off
his nose and shatter. Readers who would
gladly annihilate the rest of the world
to attain the perfect reading conditions
inevitably set themselves up for failure.
Anybody who has made elaborate, al-
most ceremonial preparations to begin
a book knows that there may never be
a perfect time and place.
The more we use our screens, it
seems, the more power we assign to
books as objects, and to turning their
literal pages as a timeless icon of lan-
guor. But our reality, some blend of
print and digital, material and imma-
terial, is perhaps no less picturesque.
On this beautiful summer morning,
while finishing this piece, I was hap-
pily distracted by the Twitter feed of
a poet named Jeremy Proehl, who, like
the mad, poverty-stricken Romantic
poet John Clare, inscribes his verse on
birch bark. Clare, who also concocted
his own ink out of “a mix of bruised
nut galls, green copper, and stone blue
soaked in a pint and a half of rain-wa-
ter,” was after permanence, not planned
transience: he would not recognize his
art in the notion that Proehl’s own
bark poems will “fade and break apart
in the weather.”
The Internet has no weather, and
these dissolving poems will be pre-
served in every state of decay. What
part of my summer morning was “read-
ing,” and what part of it was distrac-
tion? Once I put the period on this sen-
tence, I’m headed outside with a copy
of John Clare’s poetry, along with my
phone, in case I need to look up some
images of chaffinches, hedge roses, or
whitethorn shrubs. 62 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
1
Dept. of Understatement
From the Victoria (B.C.) News.
“I often say that as a coroner, you are deal-
ing with people at the worst time in their lives.”