For some reason, I began
thinking of sports. Probably because it was Memorial Day weekend
which is saturated
with sports. Also, the real reason behind Memorial Day seems
a bitter one to contemplate these days given how our nation’s “leaders” persist
in providing us ever more victims to memorialize with their immoral
neo-imperialism. It sickens me and I am ashamed. Ashamed because
I have not done enough—maybe no one can—to stop the use of our
country’s military as a hitman for corporations. Apparently,
what's good for Halliburton is good for America.
Given that backdrop, is it any wonder I was thinking
about another type of hit man? Specifically, Ken Griffey, Jr.?
I’d glanced at the sports page of the Sunday Cincinnati Cowering
Liar and
noticed that Junior had hit two home runs in the game the night
before. Guess his dislocated shoulder’s recovered, I thought.
Which immediately brought to mind a Simpsons episode
I’d seen
recently in which Moe dislocates his shoulder in an attempt to
entertain Maggie. This in turn made me recall Mel Gibson as Riggs
in the Lethal Weapon movies who dislocates his shoulder
to escape from a straitjacket. That made me remember that Houdini
used
the same method to escape from straitjackets. Thinking of Houdini
made me fondly recall one of my favorite reading binges. One
year, I was in 7th grade I think, I became obsessed with magicians
and read every book on magic and magicians I could find. At one
point, I was reading about a book a day. And at this point, I
began to think about this whole chain of memories process and
I wondered how long it would usually take before my chains added
a book-related link. Not very long, I realized. And once that
link was forged, the chain could continue to be made entirely
of an infinite number of book memories. Just talk to me and see
how
quickly
I say something like, “I read somewhere that . . .”
I’m an ambulatory library with a crumbling database
system, unshelved books scattered everywhere, hundreds more not
even catalogued yet, periodicals piled precariously on the coffee
table—you
get the picture.
The idea of a walking library reminds me of another
idea I’m fond of: the book as cyborg. The dictionary says a cyborg
is “A human who has certain physiological processes aided or
controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.” This means we
are surrounded my cyborgs; we ourselves are probably cyborgs.
I am: my ears require hearing aids to hear badly. Do you wear
eyeglasses? Have a pacemaker? Recognizing that the alphabet
is a technology, deployed both mechanically and electronically,
and further recognizing that literate people have internalized
this technology, and that such internalization effectively means
that certain of their “physiological processes” are now being “aided
or controlled” by that technology, it follows that if you know
how to read, you are a cyborg.
It also follows that books are cyborgs. That they
are a mechanical technology is not hard to see; the human components,
I would claim are the records of consciousness and consciousness
in action revealed on the page.
Therefore, as someone whose being consists
of so many books, that means that I’m a cyborg made of cyborgs.
I love it when thinking turns in on itself like a nautilus shell.
And that’s when I realized why I think an enterprise
like Spineless Books is so important. To the degree that I am
what I read, I want what I read to be something I haven’t seen
before, something that shows me new ways to read, something that
stimulates all the other books in my head, something that makes
me smile as I appreciate some lovely ingenuity, something fresh
that will blow the dust off the tired books, the old stories.
Of course, maybe all our stories are the old stories.
But I like to think there will always be new ways to tell them.
Spineless Books encourages that search for new ways to write,
to read, to think, to live.
—Dirk Stratton |
