The End of Books?

Today is the last day that my local Borders will be open, and yesterday I decided to pay it a visit. Bookstores in general have always felt like an outer extension of my mind - the books, the music, the atmosphere. Bookstores are some of the few places where I can really hear myself think, and yet at the same time I can feel the presence of all those better thoughts, penned by wiser people. It inspires me.

But this was not the place I saw last night.

The place I saw last night was skeletal, dying, dead.

The bare bones of floor to ceiling bookshelves that used to always move with the flow of the room and my train of thought sat naked with nothing but the adornments of packing tape and sale stickers. The few books still for sale, less than 50 total, haphazardly stacked onto a few tables and clearanced beyond belief. I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the words in these books that, after an 80% discount, people were still so reluctant to read. If no one will read them now, when will they ever? I can't help but imagine myself in five years - experiencing all the excitement and hopefulness of publishing a book, only to find it filling the discount bins two months later.

If print books even exist in five years, that is.

It's all I can stand to see one of my favorite shops in this state, when workers come in and start ripping off baseboards, taking doors off the hinges, and adjusting sale signs. It's hard to see Border's like this - controlled by the all important dollar. Then again, it controls all of us. In the weeks after the closing sales started, the stores were filled with discount shoppers, sweeping in to take advantage of their misfortune. I was there. And you were there. And now, the building sits with a few unwanted books and a mother who wont let her son by a $3.00 book with his own money because, "books aren't worth money unless they're really special", while a new bar waits for it's turn to move in.

Say what you want about me, or borders, but books are something else. Books are people. The way they wish they were, the way the used to be, the way they fear, the way the love. And losing them is like losing a million lifetimes.

Vampires.

Over the past couple of years I've noticed that vampires have gotten a bad reputation (and yes, I mean beyond that of being soulless monsters roaming the earth for blood, chicks, and big castles with an exorbitant amount of cobwebs). Books like Twilight and the Vampire Diaries, their less than noteworthy film spin off version, and the plethora of other media forms that have jumped on the bandwagon, have become common place to scoff at - perhaps successful just as much from the haters as the true fans. Something that once induced laughter induces mockery, and just as the original Count's tale signified the issue of women's rights and the prejudices against foreigners, today they show the distinction between the heart-controlled feminine and the aloof masculine; the emotional and selfish single mindedness of youth and the cocky judgemental attitude of what ever stage can be said follows it.

But here's the rub: vampires are my favorite monster. Have been for as long as I can remember - far before these days when they pine for humanity and, dare I say it, sparkle. How did the creature that simultaneously fascinated and frightened me become a laughing stock? I think, in the end, it comes down to emotion. Beings like Dracula were created, in essence, to escape. To feel fear and then be comforted by the comparative easiness of our own life. To, for a moment, live in the extreme.

Modern day's monsters aren't the fearless scourge of society. Now they are jaded. Haunted by their intense love and their struggle for self-control. Maybe it's more realistic (or, at least as realistic as you can get once you cross over into "undead" and "soul mate" territory), but it's also less constructive. One machine of story telling with one way of thinking not only robs our imagination and it's need for extremes, but it robs ourselves.

There was a time when books and symbols stood for something. Hi, I'm a ghost and I represent unfulfilled desires and regrets. Or, hi, I'm a zombie, but you can just call me peer pressure and the struggle to be unique or alone in a world without limits. But now, the image that I and most others in my age bracket see is, hi, I'm a vampire. Let me show you that real men are moody, while I love you unrealistically and prove that my stalker-ish tendency of watching you sleep at night is perfectly normal.

They say that sex sells, but I guess now a days all it takes is the promise of love. But a single minded existence isn't much of a dynamic life. Then again, it's not much of a dynamic book, either.

Edit: This isn't meant to be a dig at anyone who like the popular vampire shows or books (I'm reading the True Blood series). This is really just my thoughts on how the usefulness of media and symbols has changed and what the possible implications of this are.

The Whole Harry Potter Thing

You would have to be living under a rock to not know that the final film installment of the Harry Potter series came out this weekend, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I braved the crowds to see it at midnight. I'm certainly not the most ravenous fan out there, but a life long fan just the same, and the end of the series symbolises many of the same things for me as it does for the characters. The end of an era, of childhood.

The first book came out when I was in the third grade. I remember it vividly because my teacher told my mother that I was not a strong enough reader to read the books which, of course, just made me want to read them more. The character's ages were close to mine, and in a weird way reading about their growth towards adult hood helped me in mine. I never had to fight the forces of evil, but I did have to deal with temptation, choices, responsibility, love, sacrifice, and friendship. I'm still dealing with them. I always will be.

And it's not just me. Such a huge percentage of my entire generation has felt what I have felt. It unifies all of us people around the world who don't know each other, but share a story. It’s not just the end of a movie. It’s the end of a relationship that started when I was in third grade and continued through film to my Junior year of college. It’s saying goodbye too the people who not only live in the book, but in myself - the ones who helped me learn how to grow up, that it's okay to be ordinary, or extra ordinary, or misunderstood. Above all, these people and books taught me that each of us is fighting through life in our own terrifying way. But some of us are fighting for something more that life.

Harry Potter was the first book that I took seriously, the first time I read past words and reached something else. That was the same year that I began to think about writing. In some strange, convoluted way, Harry Potter was the start of my adult life - my career, and the only thing that has consistently made me happy, content.

I guess I'm just trying to say, Thank you J.K. Rowling. Thank you for happening upon a pot of gold, and thank you for sharing it with me. With us.

Me at the midnight showing. If you can't see the shirt, I combined the deathly hallows with a lightning bolt. Yeah. Clever.

The Problem

with the speed reading that is necessary to do when you're an English major, are the lyrical gems that often get disregarded, or blown right past. Like this one, from Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance:

"It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves."

And to think that some people call reading a waste of time...