what does a hardcover mean?

August and September may simply be the months for me to read and write. (Yes, it's October now, but I started writing this at the end of September.) The archives of this newsletter show that in 2020, I sent four emails from August 20th to October 5th — then nothing more till March. Though I graduated college in May 2020, the rhythm of the school year has, for now, persisted. Those four emails were written in the excitement and newness of having just started the Shalom Project — now, as another school year for those still in school gets underway, I have the excitement and newness of a new home and new job. So rather than once again pronouncing my intentions to send this out regularly, this time I just ask your understanding if emails from me tend to come mainly in the wake of Major Life Changes.

Anyway, I've been at my new job for eight days now. This should make whatever 'reflections' I have hilariously pretentious.

About the job: I've almost become proficient with the pistol grip packing tape dispenser. In one of life's ironic synchronicities, I assisted, at two points in the process, in putting a new hardcover on a copy of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 3 in C Minor for the library of a prestigious music school—a piece I spent 3 to 5 years learning the first movement of by memory, to the ultimate end of placing 3rd in a local concerto competition. (I listened, best I could from outside the performance hall, to the other contestants, and regret to say the placement was absolutely correct. I received a generous cash prize, which eased the disappointment of not getting to perform the concerto with an orchestra.)

Most of my workplace does is, in fact, placing hardbacks on library books (for durability reasons) — this was a phenomenon I had observed in the Millersville University library, though I didn't stop to wonder how or why they got that way. And though I have yet to get very far in Mythologies by Roland Barthes, which I ordered to help me understand semiotics better, I am pondering what it means for a book to be cased in a hardcover — how the form affects the content.

I myself prefer paperbacks in my personal library, which I'm not sure I noticed before — but then again, I have long been attracted to ubiquity and disposability. (If I consider myself a capitalist, it is only on these grounds.) Gas station convenience stores and fast food chains alike keep an endless supply of coffee and cheap hot meat sandwiches available 24/7, and I find that nearly as beautiful as being able to fit my copy of Hamlet or Pygmalion in my coat pocket with ease. Everything is "words, words, words"—the incorporeal public domain self-replicates, spawning adaptations and re-imaginings and ever more new editions of the same old books. (Once, I myself ordered, from a print-on-demand publishing company, a single copy of a volume combining Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, and The Importance of Being Earnest. I didn't get the indentations right, but what's done is done.)

In fact, this particular aesthetic preference of mine once led me into an argument with a good friend, a devout anti-capitalist Roman Catholic. I had been wandering around Salvation Army and had encountered, on a sad little bottom shelf, a battered NIV paperback Bible. I wished the Word of God here had received better treatment—but still, how inspirational in its way, that sacred Scripture has been so mass-produced that, in its ubiquity, one can obtain several 99-cent copies of the complete canon from a thrift store?

My friend disagreed. Better to have fewer copies that would actually be not only respected, but read, he said, conjuring an image of his future family with no Bible but one: a large heirloom to be gathered around for family devotions. (For all the jokes I've heard about sleeping with a Bible under your pillow to absorb it "by osmosis," perhaps we really do believe that people will start reading the Bible eventually if we just print/distribute/buy enough copies. Has a single one of the green Gideon's ESV New Testaments I saw being passed out at Millersville University every semester or so ever been read in its entirety?)

(And on that note, I was told in my childhood fundamentalist churches/other religious activities that the Bible being eventually outlawed, as in other countries, was inevitable in America—hence the importance of memorization. Or something like that. But can you imagine trying to track down all the Bibles in all the Salvation Armies of the nation? Not just that, but preventing the circulation of a 4.25 megabyte text file? — yes I just downloaded the KJV from Project Gutenberg to check the file size)

Several days after writing the above paragraph, I watched The Book of Eli, an action film about an apocalyptic future America where the Bible was—can you guess? Yup: outlawed and destroyed to the last copy, except one. I found it the least believable part of the movie, though perhaps the Rapture happened in the world of the movie and no one remaining cared about preserving the Bibles. This wild hypothesis about the movie is partially supported by the fact that the one remaining Bible is delivered, at long last, not to a community of faith but a community of scholars.

At my work, my boss takes care of the Bible orders personally. Unlike the larger projects, these are orders from individuals, looking to have their Bible rebound for longevity. Which, again, is a trait much better accomplished by hardbacks than softcovers.

Of course, a Bible per say is easily replaced, as the Salvation Army bottom shelf demonstrates. I can even think of at least two thrift stores off the top of my head that don't charge for their Bibles. (Again, this strange belief in the era of YouVersion that handing out free Bibles will get people to read it. I have what feels like 20 Bibles, many purchased holding this delusion in regards to myself.) But family Bibles are irreplaceable—perhaps the handwriting of a parent, or years of accumulated margin notes and underlined verses. "Perfect" is not the correct word—yet it has the quality of everything being where it ought to be, now and ever. No alteration to the content can be brooked.

Hardcover means: everything inside is in its proper place.

The Bible itself lends itself to this understanding. The word I do want to use is formal — not, stuffy formal, but form-al: possessing the correct shape or mold, which Google tells me is the meaning of the Latin forma, where the word comes from. Less often than I have heard jokes about absorbing the Bible by osmosis, I have seen jokes by people purporting to "rate" the Bible. 6½ stars out of 10, say. Slow at parts, didn't understand the character motivations of "God" a lot of times, that Jesus guy seemed pretty cool though. We laugh at this (or, at least, we laugh at better versions of the joke) because we understand that the Bible is fundamentally unrateable. Its structure, provenance, and genres are unlike any other book—and even if some genius were to write an experimental novel that could be considered comparable, the resulting work would still not have extended the tendrils of its influence through centuries of culture as the Bible has.

(I wonder if this can explain the appeal of Wes Anderson films—if the symmetry of his visual compositions, by sticking to a clearly defined form, seem formal, formalized—an element of intentionality that makes it more difficult to say, "well, the filmmaker ought to have done this instead, except they were careless or stupid.")

So much for Bibles. So much, too, for the theses my work prints and binds—works that may in fact be stuffy-formal, and if not, at least carefully present years of research and have been approved by multiple people.

What then, can I make of the books I see passing through—getting individually stamped with shiny foil—that I suspect are little more than ill-advised vanity projects? Partially, I just laugh at them: who are these people to think their work deserves this many copies, each so beautifully bound? But I don't know how many loved ones these people have; as with Bibles, I imagine having well-preserved writings from someone can be a gift. Not everything typed has to have universal appeal to be valuable.

so the word i was looking for is ‘formalism’

In retrospect, the aside about Wes Anderson is unmerited. I’m not a terribly big Wes Anderson fan, and one of his films is on my small list of films I have never and will never see, mostly out of content concerns. But I did just watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a Wes Anderson film, for the first time yesterday. I highly enjoyed it—perhaps I’m a bit of a sucker for laconic movies where the performances are more-or-less deadpan throughout.

I also finished reading a PDF of a forthcoming book that, at one point, briefly referenced “formalism”—an approach to art, to film, that “is focused on the formal or technical elements”.. I presume the word was knocking around somewhere in the back of my head, thus resulting in my clumsy attempt earlier to re-invent what seems to be an existing field of study.

It’s now Sunday night. The weekend has gone by fast, but so did the past workweek. I’m the youngest person at the bookbindery by seven years. One coworker tells me, with some bemusement, that he came to work here just for a summer—that was 40 years ago. I doubt I’ll be there quite so long, but—stop me if I’ve said this before—I’m a little amazed at having reached a point of possible stasis. Are the stories I’ll tell into middle age the stories I already tell? Is this all life is, more or less?

voyeuristic musicals?

In late March, my housemates and I watched Little Shop of Horrors (the 1986 musical, not the Roger Corman B-movie it was adapted from), and last weekend, the four of us who are still living in America reconvened to watch the musical Fun Home live on stage at the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster.

My favorite musical number from Little Shop, “Skid Row (Downtown),” is also one I feel a little conflicted about. It portrays how difficult life is in the titular neighborhood—so is it weird, or strangely voyeuristic, that we’re watching hopefully well-compensated performers in a garish movie perform this number on a soundstage? My one housemate countered this thought by saying such real emotion ought to be portrayed, and can only be portrayed so thoroughly through music.

That exchange came to mind after watching Fun Home, the original Broadway production of which won 5 out of 12 Tonys it was nominated for in 2015. When, in the opening number, a young girl sings that she “can see all of Pennsylvania” while playing ‘airplane’ with her father, the same thought went through all our minds — did they change the lyrics to match our state? But no, the musical simply happened to have been adapted from a memoir about real events that happened near State College in 1980. The possibly accidental death of one Bruce Bechdel, a part-time funeral home director and high school English teacher, at age 44, was a small-town tragedy; but, as far as tragedies go, surely a relatively mundane one. What made it notable was Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir, in which the snake that may or may not have scared him into jumping into the road becomes the ouroboros—a beginning and ending simultaneously—and a simultaneous reflection of both masculinity and femininity mirroring Bruce’s queerness. Alison Bechdel did not create the musical—Lisa Kron and Jeanne Tesori brought the detached, documentarian memoir to the stage and injected it with emotion. And now we live in a world where the 2015 Tony for Best Leading Actor went to a man who put on a wig every night to sing through a reenactment of this small-town tragedy with live orchestral accompaniment. Strange, no?

It feels similarly uncomfortable, a little voyeuristic. Not like Hamilton, which won Best Musical the next year. Alexander Hamilton chose to be a public figure; of course his tragic death would become fodder for popular dramatic entertainment.

But you know what? I don’t really care that much. If the history of a few small lives ends up as a Broadway musical, so much the better. At least, I estimate it’s no better or worse than being preserved in an understated, little-seen film documentary.

That’s my take, at least.

As always, replying to this email should get you in touch with me. Feel free to reach out!

Benjamin