Bookshelf Revelations

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Last week The Millions ran an interesting article, “In Our Parents’ Bookshelves” by Kevin Hartnett, about the effect E-readers will have on the books people buy in hard copy vs. electronic version and how that will have an impact on what we see on personal bookshelves. Hartnett realized while watching his young son play with a pile of books that “the clunky objects he was playing with seemed like relics.” Bookshelf contents reveal much about their owner. After examining the books on the shelf in his mother’s bedroom at the house where she’d grown up, Hartnett describes them as resembling “a type of monument.” He writes, “I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my mother as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life was as bottomless as I knew my own to be.”

I do not yet own an E-reader, but I imagine that day is not far off. I already buy Kindle downloads for my iPod Touch. I downloaded the free app for iPods last year while recovering from hand surgery, during a time when it was difficult for me to hold a book. I read my first Kindle books holding the iPod in my good hand while my other hand was immersed in the fluidotherapy machine at physical therapy.

I’m not an earlier adopter of gadgets, however, simply because I don’t have the discretionary income to be one. My budget tells me I have to wait to see what the best option will be, and it’s still too early to tell. I want an E-reader that will allow me to make annotations onto the page as the Kindle does, yet I’m reluctant to buy a Kindle simply because I’m leery of having a bookseller as powerful as Amazon have that much control over what is published and how it is stored (and considering how Amazon went about removing Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles last year – copies which the Kindle owners had purchased – that is a serious concern). I was counting on Apple to come up with an E-reader that would dazzle me, but the iPad seems not much more than I already have with my iPod. In fact it even looks like a big iPod – maybe too big. I want an E-reader that is light in weight that will fit in my purse, something about the size of a trade paperback.

One reason an E-reader appeals to me is simply that I’m running out of space for more bookshelves. We’re at a point in our lives where we should be downsizing, but if we bring many more books home we’re going to need to build on an addition just for books. I’m thinking of attaching a silo as a circular library equipped with a very tall ladder. Seriously. I once saw a photograph of one and immediately asked Kevin, “Can we get one? Huh? Huh? Can we get one this weekend?”

I’ve loved books since I was a very young girl. My grandmother had a bookcase in her living room filled with Book of the Month Club editions, which I now realize must have been a huge luxury considering my grandparents’ income. They lived in a very small town in the mountains where the nearest library was twenty miles away. Before I could read, I used to take books from Grandma’s bookcase and turn the pages, amazed that those black markings on the page were words that held a story – knowing that someday I would be able to read them myself. Grandma had grown up in a house with a library room, which I remember well from visits to my great-grandmother’s house. The library table from her house is now in my own home. I used it for many years as a desk, but now keep it in the guest bedroom where the bottom shelf of that table is filled with stacks of books I haven’t found shelf space for yet.

In the small house where I grew up, my parents didn’t have many books of their own. They subscribed to Life and Look, though, and I suspect that looking at the photographs in those glossy magazines had an influence on me wanting to study photography later. After my dad’s retirement he had more leisure time to read, and he then bought books on history and religion which began to accumulate in their house.

The first bookshelf of my very own was built into the headboard of my bed, and I gradually filled it with books from the Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden series, as well as paperbacks from Scholastic Books which were available for students to buy through our school. But most of the books I read as a pre-teen were borrowed from the local library, which my mom drove me to during the summer months when I couldn’t get books from my school library.

When I was a teenager, my dad built a pine bookcase for me which I quickly filled with paperback copies of favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, and The Yearling among them – as well as more popular best sellers of the time such as Love Story, which all the girls at school were reading. Someone searching through my bookshelves back then would’ve seen a mind trying to figure out her place in the larger world – moving from fashion and advice in magazines such as Ingénue and Seventeen, to the novels of Hemingway and the Bronte sisters, and back to teen idol magazines such as Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine (hello David Cassidy) until I outgrew and replaced them with Rollingstone Magazine (hello James Taylor and Jackson Browne).

College friendships were formed in part by seeing what LPs (those were the final vinyl days) and books were on someone’s shelves and determining what interests we shared, and by seeing what new books and music their interests opened up to us. Now, books are about to go the way of LPs and CDs. Have you noticed how small the music section is getting at stores lately? No? Perhaps you’ve stopped browsing and shopping there too, just as happy to purchase and download the files from iTunes for your iPod.

When Kevin and I first joined our lives together and were barely eking out a living in San Francisco back in the late 1970s, one of the first pieces of furniture we purchased was a bookcase. This was not a bookcase we bought in a store, but rather one that Kevin built after borrowing tools to cut and sand the planks of pine we carried home from the lumber store. We didn’t have a car back then, but somehow managed to get the lumber home on a Muni bus – the 38 Geary, to be exact. Those were the days! Our other furniture had been borrowed from his sisters, but that bookcase was ours. We filled it with used paperbacks we bought for about a quarter apiece at Green Apple Books, which I’m happy to say is still in business and still in the same location on Clement Street.


What my bookshelves reveal about me today would depend on which bookcase you were inspecting. We have books in nearly every room of the house, including the basement. In the study, which Kevin and I share and is the room where we spend most of our time, there are three long bookshelves above our desks. The bottom shelf is filled with reference books and books on writing craft, the upper shelves filled with novels. Lining the top of the credenza are oversized volumes, mostly photography books. In the living room is an oak bookcase with glass doors containing the signed and inscribed books we’ve acquired, many of them by West Virginia writers. That bookcase also holds most of our Beat writer collection, as well as numerous talismans related to the imagery in the novel I’m working on – a miner’s head lamp and coal mine core samples, a mastodon tooth (which can be seen on the shelf in front of the Kerouac books) and various other fossils too fragile to keep on my desk.

Kevin Hartnett closes his article by saying, “It remains to be seen how many more generations will have the adventure of getting to know their parents this way. . . To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, however, the open-ended, undirected progressions of a life defined by books will surely be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.”

What do your bookshelves reveal about you? In what ways do you think the new digital book technology will change how you read and acquire books?


Around the Blogosphere:

A Conversation with Irene McKinney
Watch Kate Long’s wonderful interview with West Virginia poet laureate Irene McKinney on YouTube (WV public broadcasting). Part 1 is here. I love hearing these two distinctive regional West Virginia accents as they discuss McKinney’s work and the discoveries which come out of the writing process itself. More than twenty years ago after earning her PhD, McKinney returned to her home place in West Virginia to finish two books of poetry while on a six-month sabbatical from the university where she was teaching in New York. She ended up moving back to West Virginia permanently. From the window of her home, she can see the house and barn that were her home place. The house she built is filled with books, which you can see in parts 2 and 3 of the interview (note to self: stop worrying about space for additional bookshelves, just start stacking them on the floor). I’ve long admired McKinney’s poetry, and have mentioned Kate Long’s radio series In Their Own Country (which includes an interview with McKinney) in previous posts here at In This Light. McKinney reads several of her poems in the interview and speaks of the memoir she is writing, which she calls “a memoir of place” because she believes describing the region and people she comes from is the best way to say who she is. (link via Meredith Sue Willis)

Literature and the Web
Meredith Sue Willis has launched a new blog, Literature and the Web, and the latest edition of her Books for Readers is now posted online. Information on upcoming appearances and her two new books, Out of the Mountains: Appalachian Stories from Ohio University Press, and Ten Strategies to Start Your Novel from Montemayor Press, both to be released in summer 2010 can be found here.

Cold Comfort: Maggie Anderson's poems on the photography of Walker Evans

I keep coming back to the photographs of Walker Evans: Appalachia and the South, farms and farmers, steel mills, graveyards, signs, churches, small towns and main streets, living rooms and porches, New York City street scenes and subway riders. These are the same iconic subjects recurrent in my own writing. Well, not the New York City subway and street scenes. Except for a long ago train trip from Chicago to Boston that involved changing trains there, New York City is outside my experience. All I really know of it is what I’ve seen in photographs and movies and books.

In last week’s post, I mentioned Philip Gefter’s essay “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” which explores the truthfulness of photographs. I’ve never questioned the truthfulness of Evans’ photographs or that they are purely documentary. In fact, a common criticism of Evans’ work is that it’s too clinical. However, in reading James R. Mellow’s biography Walker Evans, I came across some information about Evans’ approach to his subjects that made me uncomfortable. Walker Evans sometimes went to elaborate lengths to conceal his photographic intent.

For his New York City subway series, Evans used a concealed camera strapped on under his overcoat with the lens poking out between the front buttons and a cable release threaded down the sleeve to trip the shutter. He was also fond of using an angled viewfinder which enabled him to photograph someone who was standing on the periphery. While it appeared to onlookers that Evans was photographing something in front of him, he was actually shooting in a different direction off to the side. To further his ruse, he often had a companion pretend to pose in front of the camera for the picture he wasn’t taking. I’m not quite sure why this bothers me since it ostensibly allowed him to document what was happening without altering or interfering with the scene – which is the key element of true documentary photography. As Gefter wrote, “As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed.”

I’m beginning to question whether Evans’ camera actually did alter the scene. It’s the eyes of his subjects that unsettle me – their curiosity, the questioning stares. Were these people standing on the sidelines? Were they caught up in watching him at work, not realizing they were his subjects? Did the presence of the camera attract their attention, creating an odd twist to the observer vs. the observed?

In the summer of 1935, Evans spent several months photographing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he was one of the photographers working on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project under Roy Stryker. Poet Maggie Anderson’s family was from Rowlesburg, WV, which is one of the towns Evans photographed. Anderson wrote a series of poems about Walker Evans and his West Virginia photographs, included in her 1986 poetry collection, Cold Comfort, which was published fifty years after Evans’ photographs.

Maggie Anderson was born in New York City where her parents worked as teachers, and every summer they traveled to West Virginia – home. In a wonderful interview with Kate Long for the radio series “In Their Own Country,” Anderson described these trips to West Virginia and how she felt freer in Rowlesburg where there were more outdoor places for a child to play than in New York City, and where she was surrounded by cousins and extended family. In response to a question in Kate Long’s interview about whether she “has it in for Walker Evans,” Anderson said, “I guess I sort of do have it in for him” but later goes on to say “he’s a wonderful photographer.” Maggie explained that there was something about Evans’ stance that made her feel protective of the people he photographed, and that Evans “couldn’t know them the way I did.” She emphasized that she wasn’t saying he didn’t have a right to make the photographs – just that he couldn’t possibly see or know those people as she does.

When asked if she’d like to look at and discuss some photographs for this blog article, Maggie respectfully declined, saying she preferred to let the poems speak for themselves and that she feels she’s said all she has to say about Evans’ photographs. I can certainly understand wanting to let the work speak for itself. They are strong and beautiful poems, the language as visual as any photograph, so that readers form their own idea of how the photograph looks.

My own feelings are somewhat mixed since I’ve stood on both sides of the camera, and for all I know I’ve been captured standing off to the side unaware as well. I understand a photographer wanting to document what he or she sees, and there could be an argument made that the angled viewfinder allowed Evans to make a purely documentary image. I see nothing wrong with shooting from the hip in a public place. It’s the elaborate subterfuge Evans employed that bothers me, and I’m not sure that the resulting images weren’t influenced by the presence of the camera in a different way. In some cases it may be that the intent and curious expressions on the faces of his subjects are because they are watching the photographer with interest, thinking they are watching him take a photograph of someone or something else.

If the people and places Evans had photographed were of my own family and home, I would feel protective of them too. But, there’s just enough distance for me to appreciate Evans’ photographs because they are of another place, of other people – even though those people are very much like the people and place where I come from. Distance equals comfort. And Evans pierced the comfort zone of the people in the West Virginia towns of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Morgantown, and Reedsville.

For me, it’s an interesting juxtaposition of work by two artists I admire. Walker Evans’ photographs show the outer experience, a limitation of the photographic art form by its nature. Maggie Anderson’s poetry peels back the exterior to reveal the emotional interior of personal territory in a way that language does best. While I still regard Evans’ photographs with great admiration, Anderson’s poetry alters the distance with which I now view them.

Photo Credits:

Top: “Main Street, Morgantown, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34376.

Bottom: “Independence Day, Terra Alta, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF3301-009002-M1.

Moundsville, West Virginia: Hometown of Davis Grubb

We took the long way to Roanoke, Virginia last October when we were driving to an event there as part of our fall vacation. Our first stop was Moundsville, West Virginia to take a look at the prison, an impressive gothic fortress which takes up several blocks in a residential neighborhood. I was intrigued by what it might be like to grow up with a 19^th century maximum security prison in your back yard. It was in use up until the end of the 20^th century and looks sinister even in the daylight, and if I were a child trying to fall asleep at night with that looming outside my bedroom window I’m sure I’d have some pretty terrifying nightmares.

But wait, it gets better. Across the street, directly in front of the penitentiary, is the Indian Mound that the town is named for, and just beyond the Indian Mound is the elementary school. Not only would I be unable to sleep, I’d be afraid to walk past them on the way to school. And since I spent most of my own school days gazing out the windows and daydreaming, I know the prison and Indian burial mound would be huge distractions since both can be seen from the front windows of the school.

As we drove further on that day along the Ohio River, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to grow up in that town, telling my husband it would be the perfect place to turn an imaginative kid into a writer. Later, when listening to a CD set of Kate Long’s radio series “In Their Own Country,” I learned that writer Davis Grubb had grown up in Moundsville. Grubb wrote several novels, including Night of the Hunter, which was made into a 1955 movie with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography. Charles Laughton directed and James Agee wrote the screenplay. If you’ve never seen it, you must. Robert Mitchum plays a nasty bad guy of the nightmare sort, an escaped convict posing as a preacher. And if you’ve never heard Kate Long’s "In Their Own Country" radio series, see if you can track down a copy which includes 14 CDs, each with wonderful interviews and a focus on a different West Virginia writer. Taylor Books in Charleston, WV -- which is one of my all time favorite book stores -- had several copies in stock last fall, and you may be able to order it through them.

Leaving Moundsville behind, we continued our journey and crossed the river at Sistersville, West Virginia to Fly, Ohio simply because we wanted to ride on the tiny car ferry we’d watched from the riverbank. Later that same day, we also stopped at Point Pleasant, WV so that we could look at the Mothman statue and take a walk along the river where the Silver Bridge once stood. We were due in Ashland, Kentucky that night, where we’d booked a hotel with a view of a steel mill, but from there our plans were intentionally vague for the next three days until we were due in Roanoke on Friday morning. The mill at Ashland, AK Steel Works, looked pretty impressive shooting flames high into the air against the night sky, and I was surprised to find that I’d forgotten how a working blast furnace sounds.

After a night in the shadow of the steel mill and some early dawn industrial photography we traveled on (OK, it was Kevin who got up before daybreak to photograph the mill while I slept, but I now regret my priorities), stopping to photograph things of interest: mountaintop removal coal mines, railroads, a vintage 1950s style amusement park and other roadside attractions. In White Sulphur Springs we splurged on lunch at the Greenbrier Hotel, where I had the best fried green tomato sandwich I’ve ever tasted, and by the time we arrived in Roanoke we’d listened to most of the CDs from “In Their Own Country.”

My coworkers tend to bring back the usual pictures of white sand beaches and sparkling blue water from their vacations, but I return with photographs of ravaged mountains, industrial wastelands, monster statues, and 19^th century prisons, not to mention notes and ideas for more stories than I can find time to write. Those coworkers of mine seem to always be interested in where I’m going on my next trip, and they always want to see my photographs when I get back. They’re already asking about what’s on the vacation agenda for this fall, but I’m wondering what stories and images I’ll discover that aren’t even part of the plan.

Photo Credits

Top Photo: Moundsville Penitentiary, copyright (c) 2008 Dory Adams

Middle and Bottom Photos: Moundsville Penitentiary, copyright (c) 2008 Kevin Scanlon, used by permission