—TRYING TO GET THE FEELING AGAIN
…Hey, hi. Today, Friday, is something different: I won’t comment about how the T administration is arresting “non-citizens” (who actually arecitizens) for illegal voting to try in an effort to thwart the onslaught the Republicans are about to face, and I won’t mention that “Special envoy” Steve Witkoff called PUTIN a (fucking) “humanitarian” this week, and I won’t mention how the monster said he should have received both The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize, and I won’t mention how the CEO of Goggled declined the monster’s suggestion that the Atlantic Ocean be named Trump Ocean, just as I won’t mention all of the other despicable things our government has done or tried to do. Instead, it’s just, Good News Friday…
Nathan Heller—The New Yorker
Does anyone read anymore? Every few years brings a new flurry of concern that books are a thing of the past. Look closely at the numbers, though—and talk to booksellers, editors, and young readers, as I did for my latest story—and you find evidence of a startling sea change. Deep in the digital age, people are tiring of their screens and their feeds, and they are rediscovering books (the paper kind!). This wasn’t supposed to happen.
For this week’s issue, I profile James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling. Daunt is the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in Britain, Waterstones. His operating theory has been simple: make bookstores good again, and people will come back. Barnes & Noble added sixty new stores last year alone.
I found Daunt a fascinating figure to stand at the center of this renaissance. He is now a suit (he oversees nearly twenty thousand employees and presides over some four billion dollars annually in sales), but before leading Waterstones, starting in 2011, he had spent more than twenty years on the floor of his own famous, independent bookstore in London, Daunt Books. There, he studied how people navigate a bookstore—how they browse, what they pick up, how their attention travels, what they buy—and became a quiet innovator in techniques to make his shops seem more inviting. Since coming to Barnes & Noble, in 2019, Daunt, a very English Londoner, has had the curious experience of successfully remaking the book business in places like Wichita, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Concern about reading decline, it turns out, is really a battle about the primacy of taste. Universities today are filled with professors who say that their students struggle to get through assigned texts. At the same time, booksellers with whom I talked across both Britain and America reported young people lining up for midnight releases; publishers detail sales rushes not seen in decades for authors such as Rebecca Yarros; and individual BookTokers have followings in the millions. To many, not least the young, both literary culture and the world of bookselling are beginning a great new climb, calling into question many presumptions about the digital century and the market models that sustain it. As the actor Bill Nighy (a longtime Daunt Books regular) observed to me, “It is made more delicious by the fact that books were dead, officially, about ten years ago.” |
The Good List, Melissa Kirsch, NYT:
I have never actually availed myself of a Little Free Library, those quaint schoolhouse-shaped boxes on the sidewalk where you can take a book, leave a book. My night-table stack is so tall that I have had to enact a law forbidding any accidental discoveries from passing the threshold. But I love to see what’s circulating, to consider the barely touched paperbacks my neighbors have abandoned.
How handy to have this world map of Little Free Libraries where you can check out the designs and even some of the inventory at the time the photos were taken. Or go on vacation without a book and decide you’ll pick up whatever’s available near your Airbnb.
I had no idea there were boxes of other little free things around until a reader alerted me to the existence of Free Little Art Galleries, where you take and leave stuff you make. (Here’s a map of the galleries.) There are little free pantries outside churches! Little free collections of miniature cars! Yarn! Seeds! Tinned fish! What is little and free that’s not being joyously exchanged? Well, apparently someone has been leaving “grungy, sharp mussel shells” and “asphalt chunks” at a trinket library in Massachusetts. No one wants those things, even if they are little and free
Trevor Rainbolt became famous for being exceptionally good at GeoGuessr, a game where you’re given a photo from Google Street View and have to figure out where in the world it is. He spent four years helping a woman figure out exactly where a random childhood photo of her and her mother was taken, and I spent one hour and 26 minutes watching a video about how he did it. I didn’t expect to watch the whole thing, but so fascinating was the tale of how Rainbolt and his team used patience, persistence and fearsome forensic sleuthing to solve the mystery, I couldn’t stop.
One exciting thing about the buzz around the thrilling new documentary “You Can See Everything” has been the evocation of Ross McElwee as an influence on the work. McElwee pioneered a personal style of documentary, complicating the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim do in their examination of the disgraced blood-testing start-up founder Elizabeth Holmes.
McElwee described his style of nonfiction filmmaking to The Times in 1993 as “an approximation of the truth that’s also of interest to someone other than yourself.” You can see this in full bloom in films he made, like “Sherman’s March” (1986), which starts out as a nonfiction examination of a devastating military campaign but quickly veers to become a diaristic essay on the search for love.
If you’ve watched “You Can See Everything” and find yourself yearning, as I did, for more of what our critic Manohla Dargis described as its “wily, disturbing, self-aware exploration of the relationship between documentarians and their subjects,” try McElwee’s oeuvre
…In 1959, a seventeen-year-old boy from Freeport, Long Island, was admitted to Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. His parents had made the decision. The doctors had a solution. The solution was electroshock therapy — administered several times a week, with more than two dozen sessions in total, intended to suppress what his psychiatrists had labeled his homosexual tendencies and control behavior that his family could not accept.
The treatment left him with lasting damage to his short-term memory. He would later write a song about the experience called "Kill Your Sons." He never completely forgave what had happened to him, or the people who had consented to it on his behalf.
His name was Lou Reed, and what they did to him in that hospital is where the story begins — not because trauma was the whole story, but because understanding what he was handed at seventeen makes everything he created afterward extraordinary.
He was born Lewis Allan Reed on March 2, 1942, in Brooklyn, and grew up in suburban Freeport in a household that had very clear ideas about what a son should be. Lou had very different ideas. He played guitar with a ferocity that rattled the walls. He was bisexual, which in the 1950s was not something a middle-class family on Long Island knew how to understand. By the time the doctors completed their course of treatment and his recovery was over, he had spent more than a year losing and slowly reclaiming himself — uncertain of what remained and uncertain of who he was expected to become.
What he became was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
He arrived in New York the way people arrive when they have run out of alternatives, and he never really left in any way that mattered. By 1965, he had co-founded the Velvet Underground with John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and drummer Moe Tucker, with Andy Warhol providing the platform — his Factory scene, his art-world connections, and his particular gift for recognizing something dangerous and making it visible. The band was not commercially successful. They barely sold records. It didn't matter. What the Velvet Underground brought into the world was a new vocabulary — music that looked directly at addiction, sexuality, and people living on the edges of a society that had no language for them, and said it all plainly, without apology.
Brian Eno famously observed that only thirty thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band. The actual number was probably higher. The influence was certainly impossible to measure.
Reed's solo career stretched across five decades and contained multitudes — "Walk on the Wild Side," the Berlin album, the noise-drone experiment of Metal Machine Music, and the late masterwork Magic and Loss. He was difficult and visionary and infuriating and irreplaceable in roughly equal measure. He moved through the world as though the experience of that hospital at seventeen had given him permanent permission to reject every convention that did not serve the truth. He wrote about what he saw, what he felt, and what he survived, in a voice that was conversational and bleak and sometimes transcendent.
Late in his life, he found Tai Chi.
He found it the way some people in later years find the thing that centers them — not as an escape from who they had been, but as a deepening of himself. He practiced the 21-form daily with the same discipline he had brought to music for fifty years. His wife Laurie Anderson, the experimental artist and musician whom he married in 2008 after more than two decades of friendship, practiced alongside him. She called him a Tai Chi master. The description was not hyperbole.
In the final months of his life, Reed was battling liver disease — complications following a transplant that had briefly seemed successful before it began to fail. He didn't give up, Anderson later wrote, until almost the last thirty minutes of his life, when he suddenly accepted it — completely and all at once, in the way that only certain people can.
They brought him home from the hospital. On the morning of October 27, 2013, he went outside into the light to look at the trees.
Laurie Anderson was holding him when he died. She wrote about it afterward in Rolling Stone in a tribute that became one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing about death and love. She described watching his hands move through the air in the water-flowing 21-form of Tai Chi. His eyes were open. He was not afraid. She had never seen, she wrote, an expression as full of wonder as his as he died.
The boy who had been strapped to a hospital table in Queens at seventeen, subjected to more than two dozen sessions of electroshock therapy because the adults around him could not accept who he was — that boy died at seventy-one in the morning light, looking at trees, his musician's hands moving through the air in a form that required nothing but presence, breath, and the willingness to let the body know what it already understood.
He had spent his whole life refusing to be controlled. At the end, there was nothing left to refuse. There was only the light, the trees, and the hands moving through air that held him gently, all the way to the end of the world.
