A Chirstmas gift to our readers.
A brief note: If you celebrate another holiday, then consider the title to be a seasonally appropriate salutation, since, well, I and Thomas are Catholic, myself, if only fashionably and it feels a bit too off the mark to say a holiday gift. So, as you probably figured, no offense is meant.
Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?
You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)
Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:
the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland
If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.
That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.
I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.
So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.
Here's to never having enough time!
Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?
You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)
Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:
the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland
If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.
That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.
I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.
So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.
Here's to never having enough time!
Labels: books, merry christmas, music, video games
posted by James Thomas à Becket | 1:43 AM
3 Comments:
Bang.
Once again, I lol at Zach.
One thing I'd have to say about the Poe collection is that you shouldn't feel so bad about leaving it behind. I find that many pillars of English literature frankly haven't aged all that well.
Now, don't get what I'm about to say wrong--I don't think most of the books I enjoy could exist without the likes of Poe, Jules Verne, and Charles Dickens to pave the way. However, one of my lasting complaints with English syllabi in both college and high school is that a number of "classics" are assigned that have fallen so far out of mainstream relevance as to be a chore to read. While "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" are still damn good in their own right, a number of these former greats help students reach the opinion that literature is, when compared to sensory stimulus available in other mediums, boring. For instance, I found "Great Expectations," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," and even "Journey to the Center of the Earth," to be more tedious than anything else. Literary trends and customs have shifted enough over the past hundred years that the lengthy descriptions (vital in the era before photography and television) are now drawn out and boring to modern readers.
Likewise, books that I embrace as classics that defined a genre, such as Isaac Asimov's masterpiece, "Foundation," (a mere 68 years old) are showing their age and rapidly drifting out of public relevance. While Asimov's anachronistic views of the path of science (for instance, nuclear power being the be-all end-all supreme energy source more than 20,000 years in the future) are quaint rather than unfortunate, other areas (the almost total lack of character development in a genre that was, at that time, largely defined by setting) are woefully lacking.
What I'm saying is, there are important works that were important to the evolution of literature as a whole that have been left as nothing but a means to an end. A few works remain socially relevant (I'm thinking of "Brace New World," but there are others, I'm sure), but many become antiquated and interesting only to literary historians.
To use an analogy, the 1960s VW Beetle was an important vehicle that made a mark on American automotive culture that lasts into the present day, but the only people who want to drive a '60s model Beetle are those who are interested in historical vehicles. That doesn't make the Beetle a bad car; it makes it antiquated.
Andrew: Ah. Thank you for the insight. Now I feel a little bit better for not purchasing a copy at Borders. Since I wrote the post, as if to underscore my previous point, I have already bought three more books, though one is a book of political cartoons.
Zach: Missed! Also, a belated Merry Christmas to you.
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