Sven BirkertsBesprekingen

Reading about books and the reading of books is one of the joys of my own reading life. In this collection of essays Birkerts, in his own personal and elegant way, shares commentaries on books that are "signposts" of his reading life. A great book for all who enjoy remembering their first readings and later connections with favorite books whether classics or just personal favorites.

A series of contemplative essays that demonstrate the enticing prose of Sven Birkerts. I have long enjoyed his literary criticism and this book shares some of the same attraction for readers like me. This is a great book to dip into from time to time just to relish the wonderful prose and the disparate insights.

An interesting and helpful reflection on how reading literature is a different experience than the kind of reading we do online. Discusses the depth and self-reflection required to really engage with good novels, and the different way that orients a reader to the world. I don't share his alarm for all text electronic, but I do agree that reading fiction requires more commitment and stamina from a reader than does reading online. Overall, I enjoyed the thoughtful essays and appreciated the opportunity to think about how I interact with text in all its forms.

Pur essendo stato scritto e pubblicato nel 1994, questo libro mantiene intatta la sua importanza. Lo leggo e lo rileggo, al suo autore devo gran parte delle mie conoscenze digitali. Lo acquistai nel giugno del 1995.

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"The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age" è un libro scritto da Sven Birkerts, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1994. Si tratta di una raccolta di saggi che esplora l'impatto della tecnologia digitale sull'atto di lettura e il futuro della letteratura in un’era sempre più elettronica.

Il titolo del libro, "Le Elegie di Gutenberg", è un riferimento a Johannes Gutenberg, l'inventore della macchina da stampa, che rivoluzionò la diffusione della conoscenza e la diffusione dell'alfabetizzazione. Birkerts usa il termine "elegie" per trasmettere un senso di lutto per la potenziale perdita della lettura e della letteratura come le conosciamo di fronte all'avanzamento della tecnologia.

Nel libro, Birkerts solleva preoccupazioni sugli effetti dei media digitali sui nostri processi cognitivi e sull'esperienza della lettura. Sostiene che l’era digitale, con la sua enfasi sul consumo rapido e frammentato di informazioni, sta portando a un declino della lettura profonda e riflessiva. Birkerts lamenta la perdita dell'esperienza di lettura immersiva e contemplativa che ritiene essenziale per lo sviluppo intellettuale ed emotivo.

Birkerts esplora anche le implicazioni culturali e sociali del passaggio dalla stampa ai media digitali. Discute di come l'abbondanza di informazioni disponibili online possa portare a un senso di sovraccarico e ansia da informazioni, rendendo difficile per le persone concentrarsi e interagire con i testi in modo significativo. Solleva interrogativi sul futuro della letteratura, sul ruolo dell'autore e sulla natura delle comunità di lettura nell'era digitale.

"Le Elegie di Gutenberg" ha acceso un dibattito significativo sull'impatto della tecnologia digitale sulla lettura e sulla letteratura. Mentre alcuni critici hanno elogiato Birkerts per aver evidenziato le potenziali conseguenze dell’era digitale, altri hanno sostenuto che fosse eccessivamente nostalgico e resistente al cambiamento tecnologico.

Vale la pena notare che dalla pubblicazione del libro nel 1994, la tecnologia digitale ha continuato a evolversi rapidamente e il modo in cui consumiamo e interagiamo con le informazioni è cambiato ulteriormente. Pertanto, sebbene “Le Elegie di Gutenberg” fornisca preziosi spunti sulle prime fasi della rivoluzione digitale, potrebbe non catturare appieno il panorama attuale della lettura e dei media elettronici nel 2023.

Basandoci sulle informazioni precedenti, ecco alcuni punti aggiuntivi su "Le elegie di Gutenberg: il destino della lettura nell'era elettronica":

La prospettiva di Birkerts: Sven Birkerts, scrittore e critico, presenta una prospettiva stimolante sull'impatto della tecnologia digitale sulla lettura. Esprime preoccupazione per il fatto che la proliferazione dei media elettronici e l’ascesa di Internet diminuiranno la nostra capacità di impegnarci in una lettura profonda e riflessiva. Birkerts sostiene che l’esperienza lineare e coinvolgente della lettura di un libro fisico favorisce una connessione più profonda con il testo e consente l’introspezione e la contemplazione.

Cambiamenti tecnologici: Birkerts esamina il passaggio storico dall'oralità all'alfabetizzazione e ora ai media digitali. Secondo lui, ogni transizione comporta cambiamenti significativi nel modo in cui pensiamo, comunichiamo e ci relazioniamo con le informazioni. Vede l’avvento di Internet e dei dispositivi digitali come una continuazione di questo processo evolutivo, ma teme che la velocità, le distrazioni e la natura frammentata della lettura digitale possano erodere la profondità e la qualità del nostro impegno con la letteratura.

Perdita di autorità: Birkerts solleva preoccupazioni sulla democratizzazione dell’informazione nell’era digitale. Pur riconoscendo i vantaggi di un facile accesso a un’ampia gamma di testi e prospettive, sostiene che l’abbondanza di informazioni online può diluire l’autorità dei canoni letterari tradizionali ed erodere il ruolo di esperti e guardiani nella cura della conoscenza.

Significato culturale: attraverso la sua esplorazione del destino della lettura, Birkerts approfondisce le implicazioni culturali più ampie dell'era digitale. Riflette sulla natura mutevole dell'attenzione, della memoria e del discorso intellettuale in una società sempre più guidata dalle tecnologie digitali. Birkerts sostiene che l’atto immersivo e solitario della lettura è essenziale per coltivare il pensiero critico, l’empatia e il senso di sé, e teme che queste qualità possano essere diminuite in un’era di costanti distrazioni digitali.

Critiche e dibattiti: "Le Elegie di Gutenberg" ha suscitato notevoli discussioni e dibattiti. I critici sostengono che Birkerts trascura i potenziali benefici dei media digitali e delle nuove forme di lettura, come l’ipertesto e la narrazione interattiva. Sostengono che le tecnologie digitali espandono l’accesso alla conoscenza, promuovono nuove modalità di creatività e consentono di ascoltare voci diverse. Altri apprezzano l'enfasi di Birkerts sul valore della lettura approfondita e sostengono che sia importante trovare un equilibrio tra consumo digitale e impegno prolungato con i testi letterari.

È importante ricordare che "Le Elegie di Gutenberg" è stato pubblicato nel 1994 e da allora il panorama digitale si è evoluto in modo significativo. Tuttavia, il libro rimane un contributo significativo al dibattito in corso sugli effetti trasformativi della tecnologia sulla lettura, sulla letteratura e sulla nostra vita intellettuale.

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Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies, warns that Western culture's willing adoption of electronic media poses a massive threat to "deep reading" and its positive effects. He believes that we are living in a state of intellectual emergency caused by our willingness to embrace new technologies at the expense of the printed word. Birkerts argues that we are sacrificing our literary culture in our zeal to embrace the wonders of the electronic age. He questions whether books as we know them are dead. Birkerts is more pessimistic about the future of reading as seductive technologies transform the reader-writer relationship. He believes that we are turning against some of the core premises of humanism as we rush to get "online" and make the transition from book to screen. In summary, Birkerts views the future of books in the age of technology as bleak and warns of the dangers of sacrificing deep reading and literary culture in our embrace of electronic media.

Many of these essays felt like responses to writing prompts given at the beginning of class.

I’m always grateful to anyone who writes a book about writing itself, the publishing world, or the creative process. This mistitled book was somewhat interesting but mostly focused on creative writing (literary essays) and how they are impacted by the new age of digital media and the habit of reading from monitors (TV screens, he calls them).
Birkerts biggest complaint is that readers now have different suppositions than earlier readers such as himself. He says this break from the past severs with the permanence of 5th century BC Greek writing which cast shade over the entire earlier oral tradition.

All of the American elites (members of Congress) send their children to private schools and academies. In these schools where reading and writing is still taught, literature will not die. It’s just consumed and enjoyed by a tiny fraction of the populace who have no social relationships to the mass of uneducated humanity who are only fed ideological propaganda.

This edition is a reprint with a new introduction and afterward.

qInteresting but outdated and pessimistic. I er what he would have made of the Harry Potter phenomenon, not that I classify Rowling as literary. And I'm sure the Fifty Shades trilogy would give him absolute conniptions.

Eventually, Sven Birkerts became a significant American commentator on poetry and fiction. But before that happened he had a lot of growing up to do. Maybe he still does, if this memoir is any evidence. I note Susan Sontag describes it as a, “very American memoir.” Given that it is largely sentimental, self-absorbed, petulant, and unreflective, I wonder if she knew at the time the double edge to her assessment. However, Birkerts is a writer who has earned his reputation through diligence, if not brilliance, so it would be surprising if there were not moments of fine prose here. There are.

I especially liked his account of his enthusiasm for Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and the process whereby he wrote his first published literary essay, “Robert Musil’s Atlantis.” There were a few other points where Birkerts’ fine writing shines. They seem, however, to share one feature. They are all points in the memoir where is isn’t focused solely on himself. Of course a memoir in general is focused on the self, but at many points one’s life story is contextualized in a larger story. It is just these points where Birkerts’ writing strikes me as satisfactory.

Birkerts is the child of immigrants from Latvia. But his is no typical immigrant story. His father was an architect, one grandfather was an artist, the other (estranged) a writer of many books of history and psychology back in Latvia. Birkerts grows up in the suburbs of Detroit. His father drives a Jaguar. He is sent to a private school. His greatest childhood complaint is that his parents speak Latvian and aren’t typical white-bread Americans. Well, I guess he was really hard done by there! But this seems to be the source of a self-congratulatory (or self-imagined) conflict with his father, of which we hear much but see little. His petulant, hard-done-by, attitude follows him to the University of Michigan and a drug-filled initial year in which he takes a full set of “incompletes” followed by a summer bumming around Europe. Fortunately for Birkerts there are few consequences to any of his actions. His family continues to support him and, I think, love him. The tension he touts between himself and his father never develops into anything more substantial than his father urging him to complete his degree and, you know, maybe get a job.

This isn’t a poorly written book, but as memoir goes, it rarely rises above the banal, and you may find yourself wondering why it was written.½

The majority of the essays in this collection are brief, not much more than a page, just long enough for Sven Birkerts to carefully elucidate a single observation perhaps, often with an ironic counter at the end to inflect the whole into a different key. They are personal in that they are principally about his own life and sometimes the lives of those in his family. They are professional in that they frequently take the writing life as their theme. The writing life of which, presumably, the essay at hand is a resultant. They are calm and calming, measured and incremental in their measurement of experience, not sad, exactly, but reflective, even wistful. They are consistently finely written and at home with themselves.

That said, I longed throughout the first half of the book for something longer, something with more substance, in which Birkerts perhaps would test himself, push himself to attain something that didn’t come so (apparently) easily. I wondered if he risked himself in fiction, or at least turned his hand to criticism, which can be an opportunity to risk something in stating an opinion, an opinion that itself might be challenged. He doesn’t, I’m sorry to say, in this set of essays but I believe he does so elsewhere. Towards the end of the book, however, there are a few significantly longer pieces, though still not very long. In these you can see Birkerts work a seam, an extended metaphor perhaps, tirelessly. Again, it is fine writing. Very readable. And yet it doesn’t take flight, even if it hints that flight is possible.

The review by samwilson2007 is by me.

I can't even remember now how I came to find Sven Birkerts, but I think it was by way of a book jacket blurb he provided for some other writer. That's the kind of reader I am. I read the blurbs, the acknowledgements, all that stuff on the copyright page, etc.

Birkerts, like me, is obviously a book-person. His whole life is a testament to that. He decided early on, around age 14, that he wanted to write, but it took him another dozen or more years to finally find his niche as a writer. After struggling throughout high school and college at writing poetry and fiction - and coming up empty - he finally began to write about what he knew: other people's books. And since then, over the past few decades, he has become recognized as a preeminent literary critic and essayist. But even at that, hey, I'd never heard of the guy.

But in MY SKY BLUE TRADES he tells of his own life. It's certainly not a rags-to-riches sort of story, since he grew up in Bloomfield Hills (a wealthy Detroit suburb), son of Gunnar Birkerts, a successful and respected architect. What makes his life story unique and interesting is that his parents were both emigrants from Latvia, so he grew up bilingual and always feeling just a bit 'different.' There were generational-cultural clashes between Birkerts and his father, an ultra-practical and orderly man. His memories of his grandparents play a big role in his development too. He attended the private and exclusive Cranbrook School, and then went on to UM in Ann Arbor. But although Birkerts comes from an upper class background, his coming of age has an element of commonality. The music of the sixties, the constant trying to fit in, a few best friends, experimenting with drugs and drinking, crushes, etc. It's all in there. And then his strivings and disappointments at college, love affairs that didn't quite work out. But it was what he had to say about books and writers and his jobs at various bookstores in Ann Arbor and Boston (after college) that gave his story a kind of "special-ness" for book nerds like me. I was reminded of a favorite memoir from another equally famous critic and columnist - Michael Dirda's AN OPEN BOOK.

I must confess I didn't dog-ear a single page in this book, because every page was special. It was a story I wanted to go on and on. I'm not Latvian. My parents weren't immigrants. I didn't come from a wealthy family. So what was it about this book? BOOKS! That's what it was. There's such a rich love of books and writing displayed here. Well, Sven, me too. Thanks so much for sharing it all, for writing it all down. I loved it!

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Sven Birkerts book on the craft of writing memoir is an excellent read, and undeniably useful to writers of coming-of-age sagas, fathers and sons memoirs, mothers and daughters memoirs, and trauma and memory memoirs, among other subjects. A memoir writer’s recollecting, in essence by re-inhabiting the former self, is a way of attempting to find meaning of one’s own experience. That being said, Birkerts poignantly explains why so many memoirs fail and why others succeed. He offers great insights into the most powerful and necessary elements of good memoir writing, such as universalizing the specific and coaxing sympathetic resonance from the reader. I highly recommend this book.

Wandering The Wilderness Until The Desert Blooms

This book by Sven Birkerts -- whose fine essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere -- may just serve to keep alive the fine art of literary criticism after the ravages of a post-modernism that has all but torn it apart. If this seems too harsh a verdict to render on the bleak outcomes to which elite intellectual efforts can all too easily lead, then please think again. Well before An Artificial Wilderness ever appeared, John Bayley had this to say in New York Review of Books way back in June 4, 1981. "The reality of the thing, the return of the thing. Structuralism and deconstruction . . . have banished physical realities from literature, replacing them with the abstract play of language, the game of the signifiers. They were on their way out anyway, they were leaving literature, and the critical process, as usual, found ways of explaining and rationalizing their departure, even of suggesting they had never been there."

Enter Sven Birkerts. He had been quietly "worrying the matter" of his voluminous readings as far back as his early days as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, when he stumbled into a second-hand bookstore as well as upon the life-lasting pursuit that later led him to the proliferating gleanings that comprise the bounty of this insightful book. But how to lay out the scatter of it all in "a single balanced entity," or better still, in some "more concrete narrative"? Avoiding the trap of trying to survey the entire span of a century, Birkerts wisely chose here instead to excavate the sites of some of its better-known prospectors in order to assay their findings -- thus dealing in substance instead of sweep. What he finds is high-grade ore. Since Birkerts has to fend off his share of sharpshooting detractors sniping at him from the hills', who take him to task for being much too fond of foreign writers over those from America's own shores, let us pick an American writer to enter as evidence and make our case. Birkerts, who clearly understands that it takes a soul to sense the sickness, lostness, or absence of another one, excavates Malcolm Lowry's overwhelming achievement Under the Volcano, rightly recognized the world over as a masterpiece in depicting nothing less than the ruin of a soul -- which in his own life, Lowry certainly lived out. No empty, arid, condescending, ivory-tower, vacuous, stuffy theorizing here. Every phrase is taut as a drawn bow string and terribly telling . . . Birkerts's no less than Lowry's. But don't take my word for it. Read this book and judge for yourself.

Because of how subtly his own mind works, Birkerts is also able to discern the subtleties working in the artful minds of those treated in his insightful essays. That, in its turn, is what can bring forth in even the most barren wilderness a bloom in the desert as rare as this.

"I've been to the crossroads and I've seen the devil there." Sven Birkerts in Gutenberg Elegies offers a lamentation for literature and a gnashing of teeth for the technological changes that will prevent future generations from savoring and devouring books. Gutenberg Elegies is a collection of 14 essays, after an introduction and with an additional ending essay which concludes and recaps the ideas. These essays tell the story of a strong relationship to, love of, and obsession with literature in book form. Each essay has a different take on this relationship to literature. The author explores aspects of, learning to read, enjoyment of reading, the nature of the reading life, the new electronic age, the critic's work, how we think, and the likely future of literature. Birkerts makes interesting and valid observations of how reading, writing and thinking are intertwined and should be glorified. However, I arrive at different conclusions than he does based on his observations. The strongest message I took away from this book was a meditation on the interconnection between reading, writing and thinking. This book review will explain how Gutenberg Elegies talks to me about making meaning through reading and writing. First I will discuss Birkerts' love of reading.

The first of the three parts is titled, "The Reading Self." The lead essay addresses how thought itself can be embodied in the written word. Already in this first essay, Birkerts laments the lost age we are leaving behind because of our new uses of video, internet and hypertext.

This first essay includes an itemized list of what we gain and lose through postmodern electronics. This essay broaches an important idea he has about a definite relationship between reading and thinking. He suggests that our ability to think is shaped by the experience of reading deeply of the correct body of literature. In "The Owl Has Flown" he also explains the connection between reading and thinking. Since it is important for us to think better, discussions of ways to improve thinking are valuable ideas to hear and consider. These points are well made should be shared widely. Next, he relates his love of literature.

The essay, "The Paper Chase" is a clear exposition of Birkerts intense love of the reading experience. This is conveyed though this autobiographical fragment that describes how he was transported, when young, by immersion in books. One aspect Birkerts comes back to again and again is how time is impacted when reading. He mentions how we are transported to a different time, or a frozen time. Also in "The Woman in the Garden" essay he talks about how time can be obliterated through reading. One sign of how strongly he was affected by reading were the occasions when tears would come to his eyes because of incidents in the book. Next he talks more about meaning and self.

In the essays "Paging the Self" and "The Shadow Life of Reading" Birkerts talks about self-formation. These offer good examples of how we interpret the meaning in books. Also, how our minds are formed and molded by exposure to books. He mentions how we each have traces of what we have read. So, he is saying we can see all the influences on a person by those traces of the books they read. In the essay "From the Window of a Train" more points are made about our growth through reading. There he mentions the ambiguities and entanglements that we encounter when engaged in the reading act. The next part of the book relates more directly with electronic communications technology.

The first essay in the second part tells how electronic mediated information processing destroys our historical perception. The additional essays in the second part critique electronic technologies including video, audio books, and hypertext. The four essays together of the second part clearly outline Birkerts' discomfort with technology in communications. A major concern for him is the mediation between the writer and the reader. Here again he demonstrates clear observations, but more questionable conclusions. This section is also the weakest because of his analysis of technology. Birkerts asserts that technology removes individuality from people. He also states that our ends and means are confused and driven by technology. These conclusions are based on his views of technology formulated when the essays were written. So the essays might need to be updated to take account of new technological interactions that exist today. The next section of the book gives the strongest warnings about the future.

The third and final part of the book, before the "Coda," is titled: "Critical Mass: Three Meditations." In the essay "The Western Gulf" he makes his assertion that things were better in the good old days. He states that we now have an impoverished culture. This is perhaps Birkerts' most extreme diatribe against all things modern. He even includes a screed against increased college and university enrollment. He says in the good old days college students could connect to people in the culture at large, and we have now lost that connection (174). Birkerts relates how the changes over the past few decades have rewritten how we apprehend reality (177). He talks about how electronic media is one of the negative influences that have wreaked havoc upon society (177). Next, Birkerts laments the place of writers in our modern world.

Birkerts asserts that the authors once had a more exalted position in society (184). He feels now our culture is controlled by moneychangers (184). He states that literature is dead in the societal perspectives (184). While he does admit that literature is a social construct, he implies that his view of literature is an extremely valuable way to conceive it. Another way he sees that society has changed in negative ways is the idea that romantic ideas are no longer respected. As explained next, Birkerts even feels the study of literature has fallen in quality.

An important concept Birkerts introduces is that the proper study of literature has been lost. He relates that there is no core by which to study literature (186). He gives the example of the obscenity trail of Lady Chatterley"fs Lover in 1960 in England. The experts who should have been able to define literature could not agree on a single definition (187). He talks about how Kernan blames this on philosophic tumults in the 20th century including Socialism, Marxism, feminism and postmodernism. Birkerts defends those conceptual efforts and sees them at least as attempting to offer some coherent philosophical frameworks. Birkerts accuses the collapse of coherent systems on the encroaching communications technologies. These technological changes have led to the printed page being less important in our world (188). In places Birkerts does mention his awareness that others disagree with some of his ideas.

The "Death of Literature" and "In the Narrowing Ledge" essays are somewhat self aware. Birkerts explains that he is somewhat divided in his views of these changes. But each essay tells of the losses we are suffering and what chances there might be for salvation. He states that we can not read literature as it is meant to be read. He says we can not make judgement about human character and values (192). He gives some good analysis of how writing and reading go together. He states that writers help readers see things in deeper ways (209). He expresses a sliver of optimism that postive change might return society to the way it was in the past. Birkerts expresses a possible hope that a type of back-draft might come that will resurrect the respect for and role of literature in our society. The final section wraps up the ideas in the book.

In the "Coda" Birkerts talks about soul, thinking, self awareness, mediation of the real and deep time. The "Coda" and "Introduction" served to bind the separate essays into a somewhat unified whole. I think they do a good job, especially given the general themes that connect the essays. Mostly the "Coda" was a recap of material covered fully in the essays. One new concept introduced, in the "Coda," is the aura. I understand aura to be somewhat like the idea of soul. He feels our mediated communication technology has a negative effect on our aura (226). Birkerts ends the book with a statement of his refusal to embrace the new technologies.

This book turned out to be very difficult to read. As individual essays they seem somewhat negative and contain an exhausting number of unpleasant diatribes. For me, what might be easy to tolerate in isolated essays becomes almost unbearable when strung together in 200 pages. I agree with most basic observations made by Birkerts. But when he goes on to draw conclusions from those observations, I often disagree. I feel the essays contain a common theme of nostalgia for the past and a harking back to the good old days. I however, do not believe those good old days of yesteryear ever existed. As a Black man, the good old days are anathema to me. When the privileged, mostly, men were able to sit in their studies and peruse the ancient tomes and enjoy the deep meaning of literature, my ancestors were slaving in the fields to make that leisure available to the select few.

In taking a cultural analytic approach to this book I ask what cultural conditions obtained for the writer that led him to make the assertions he made. My conclusions relate to the time and place and situations of the author's youth and development stages. Fortunately Birkerts offers autobiographical details and cues within this book. English was not his first language. As he acquired proficiency in English he discovered literature that could entertain and enlighten him as a beginning reader. As a critic making his living through his essays, Birkerts has an interest in sounding the warning bells about the loss of literature. While I agree society has transformed over the last 50 years, in large part due to technological changes, I would suggest our relationship to the written word has been undergoing continuous change over the last few hundred years. Next, I explain where I think Birkerts' conclusions might lack deeper context or understanding of technology's impact on our society.

I disagree with an unspoken assumption that there was a great deal of reading for depth and philosophical growth before the second half of the 20th century. I believe that most literacy in the past couple of hundred years in Europe and America was driven by a need to read the Bible. I accept the statistics that Birkerts quotes that more books are published and purchased now than at anytime in the past. I interpret this to mean exactly what it says. Birkerts dismisses the fact as irrelevant. Another assumption is that somehow deep reading in the past made people better. Instead I would assert that the problems we have today which include political, environmental, economic, social and technological ones are due to failures of our past leaders and populations in making wise decisions. I do not assert we are any better today, I am only arguing against the good old days.

In "The Owl Has Flown" Birkerts has interesting comments about the "ermeneutics circle" (75). He is saying people need to have opinions about means and ends. This is a good harking back to discussions led by Professor Giotta about ends versus means in the growth of communication technologies. Birkerts states we have lost the assumption of ends. I would instead hope that we can reach conclusions without accepting the ends that past generations accepted as givens. Today religion and privileges of wealth and power are not givens, and we should continually question the ends believed by past generations. Again and again, in the essays, Birkerts relates missing the stability offered by the structures of the past.

Another point of stability that Birkerts states has been upended is Kernan's "knowledge tree" (189). I would agree that it has been upended and I applaud that upending. The knowledge tree as conceived by Kernan and Birkerts is a division of the world into static, arbitrary separate branches, of intellectual study, that often led scholars down wrong paths. For example, to say that philosophy must be separate from linguistics or natural science is a wrong division of the world. Birkerts admires a former exalted state of authors that he believes once existed.

In "The Narrowing Ledge" essay Birkerts explains his belief that movies like Youngblood Hawke from 1964 would not be made today because writers don't have the respect they once did. I immediately thought about Moulin Rouge from 2001where the protagonist is a writer. There are numerous other movies made about writers, some unflattering, some of them not exactly novelists, like Adaptation (2002), The Ghost Writer (2010), Anonymous (2011). I list these to indicate that Birkerts' conclusions sometimes miss the point. He also asserts that editors today have different roles, than they did in the good old days. He says that now they are just commercial businessmen. I instead believe that printing has historically been a business enterprise. I would actually suspect there is more not-for-profit printing going on today than at anytime in the past.

Finally, here are some of Birkerts' most damning critiques of the changing relation to literature. He bemoans that with new ways of relating to media we don't have that overwhelming loss of connection to the present. He also states we lose what makes us spirit creatures. We are overwhelmed with utilitarian pursuits and forget primal terms of existence. He states that our immersion in the electronic media culture instead of literature causes a loss of our individuality (202). Because we do not engage in the subjective immersion of reading literature we are lesser beings. He asserts the the computer screen is incompatible with the special change in time that is accessible through literature. He even states we will lose our ability to pursue meaning because we are not deeply reading literature. Birkerts makes many great observations and a large number of philosophical conclusions about the world we live in today. I think the observations are valuable but suggest taking a pinch of salt with the conclusions.

The strongest conclusions put forth by Birkerts alienated me from accepting any of his ideas without thorough examination. For example the implication that we only do serious thinking when we are lost in the imagined world of literature strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. Today, as I worked on this review I had the computer on in the background watching a live broadcast of protestors at a Walmart warehouse who were risking arrest in support of workers there. Last night I gave a nonviolence training to 100 of these protestors and Union organizers and was fascinated to see how the technology of live video recording and broadcasting made it possible for me to watch the live interaction between my students and the police about 100 miles away from where I was typing. So while I was engaging in many bad technologies according to Birkerts, I would argue that my engagement in the real world is sometimes even more valuable that being lost in the deep time of great literature. So, while I would agree we make meaning through writing and reading, we also make meaning by acting in the world and using new communication technologies.

A series of autobiographical pieces by the master of reflection and slow time
Throughout his life, Sven Birkerts, one of the country’s foremost literary critics, has carved out time for himself—to walk, to swim, to read, to contemplate. Now in his late fifties, he has clocked up many thousands of hours of reflection. It shows in his prose, which proceeds at a refreshingly deliberative pace as it draws the reader into his patterns and rhythms.
In this deeply appealing and engaging collection of essays, Birkerts looks back through his own life, as well as at the generations before him, and ahead at the lives of his children. We read how the writer witnesses his son’s frightening sailing accident, how he feels when he encounters his own prose from many years ago, how finding a cigarette lighter or a lost ring releases a cascade of memories. The objects he sees around him—old friends, remembered places—are excavated, their layers exposed.
But most winning of all is the emerging character of Birkerts himself. We come to have great respect for this competitive but deeply loyal friend, the caring father who respects his children’s independence even as he tries to connect with them, the traveler, the onetime bookseller, the writer at all stages of his writing life, and throughout it all, the attentive, passionate reader.

This memoir was somewhat disappointing after having read his wonderful books of literary criticism. In 1969, the kid who lived in the dorm across the hall from Sven (the University of Michigan's Mosher-Jordan residence hall) slipped a tab of mescaline into his beer. "I felt myself being lifted slowly up in a rich, comprehending hilarity," Birkerts writes in "My Sky Blue Trades," his graceful and ultimately melancholy memoir of the '60s and '70s. Birkerts' mescaline trip had its conceptual aspect as well. "Everything -- absolutely everything -- made sense," he notes. "Profound sense. The doorknob - - perfect, beautiful, what a thing to have there on the door, which was really all about openings in space, points of entry and departure." While I was also in college (University of Wisconsin's Sellery residence hall) in 1969 I had very different experiences. My own memories include encountering the films of Bergman and expanding my knowledge of music, drama and art. His very different search for freedom in his life did not impress me. Fortunately, he went on to become one of the premiere literary critics of our age.

A master of language. Inspiring.½

This collection of essays and stories changed my life! That's probably putting it far too strongly, but in reading this book I did gain some greater level of comfort and clarity about using technology to support art (specifically writing onscreen).

A collection of fiction, poetry and essays both contemporary and ancient. Worth reading.

The relationship between a book and it's reader is quite a personal matter. I wonder if authors consider that the book they write is not necessarily the one the reader reads. We all bring ourselves to the page. Birkerts' has two selves, that of the teen reader and that of the middle-aged man. He discusses them both in this collection of essays about The Catcher in the Rye, Pan, Women in Love, Madame Bovary, Humboldt's Gift, Lolita, The Moviegoer, the Good Soldier, The Ambassadors, To the Lighthouse, and The Beggar Maid. He piqued my curiosity so that I'm making my way through each one of these books myself, eager to have my own experience of them. That a writer makes you hungry for a book is a sign of success, I think. Highly recommended reading.

I enjoyed reading this book, but while I thought he made some good points, there were many times where I felt he came across as a hysterical technophobe. Least convincing argument—that people’s lives are becoming so incredibly boring that soon there will be nothing interesting for writers to write about anymore.

The past and future of books and reading--intoxicating reading of its own.

A collection of essays in three sections. The first section is Birkerts continually complaining about the rate of change – supposedly society in general, and reading in particular, is going to hell in a hand basket because of the ever increasing rate of technological change and dependence. Whatever. This is also a man that absents himself for the need to participate in important political action because he reads, thinks and writes, and therefore makes great changes in and on society. Again, whatever. The next two sections are not that much better.

There are a few nice essays in here – ‘States of Reading’ was a good reflection of what goes on when a reader is absorbed into the world of a novel – but in general most of the writing in here was of the prissy, over-laboured style of literary review/criticism that drives so many people away from reading essays written about literature. Not much point even picking this one up.

After some years since reading it, I don't recall enough to discuss it.