Undergraduate seduction checklist from the 1970’s: Blue Nun? Check. Musk Oil? Check. Copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, open on the couch? Check. Record collection parted, like your hair, carefully in the middle, at letter M for Mitchell, Joni? Check and mate.
What prompts this fragrant gust of nostalgia? Well, I traveled to the Lake District recently, spending hours on Virgin Trains. (I know, I know. The jokes are too easy. But it’s true: they are overheated, and they take forever to come.) What struck me during my long hours riding the rails was that, once we lost cell phone reception, everyone withdrew into their own private corner of the media multiverse, tiny wires dangling from their ears, heads nodding to a beat nobody else could hear. Young men played silent games on their iPhones. A few women flipped through fashion magazines. I was reading American Pastoral on a Kindle. Nobody in my car had a book.
We keep hearing that the digital age has made us more connected, but what I see in all those dangling wires and glowing screens is a strange kind of commodified loneliness. Books and music used to be part of our social identity: the first thing you did when you went to someone’s apartment was to check out their book shelves and their record collection, and the first rule of seduction, at least among English majors, was to display your poetic soul through the cheap Grove Press paperbacks of Beckett and Genet and the indie records stacked between your cinder blocks. (This step was particularly important if, like me, you had a low budget and no game, along with a terror of nuns and a deep mistrust of musk. Where exactly do they drill for musk oil, anyway?)
Reading my Kindle, I couldn’t help thinking about Joanne Kaufman’s recent article in The New York Times on the death of the book cover as a form of social identity and a kind of intellectual come-on:
And as books migrate from paper, it means the death of the pickup line, “Oh, I see you’re reading the latest (insert highbrow author’s name here).”
Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show “Bookworm,” uses the term “literary desire” to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. “When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,” he said.
Book covers are designed to advertise the publisher’s wares, but they also serve as advertisements for ourselves. In social terms, you are what you read. So how will like minds find each other in the digital age? “What’s on your Kindle?” sounds to me like the lamest possible pick-up line. How, then, will the literati mate?
I fear not only the death of the book, but the death of reading itself if hipster boys cease to carry around Virginia Woolf novels in order to make passes at girls who wear glasses. Should those girls start dating marketing analysts, then irony might vanish from the human gene pool. (Not to mention the effect on property values in Brooklyn.)
So if we’re going to be stuck with the Kindle and its digital descendants, may I make a suggestion to the designers of the next generation of these gadgets? E-covers, which display to the world what’s on the screen or most recently read. (No doubt those hipster boys will figure out how to hack the software to get credit for Emily Dickinson or Toni Morrison when they’re really reading The Gamer’s Guide to World of Warcraft. But that’s no different from the old trick of switching the cover on a book. Caveat emptor, ladies.)
Reading is a social act. As a species, we need some way to advertise our taste in books and music that’s more committed than a t-shirt and less permanent than a tattoo. Otherwise, the rise of digital culture may condemn us to our own hundred years of solitude, isolated in our self-amusements, stuck in our single-player worlds, tweeting like plaintive nightingales in the neon-lit night as our social connections fade and we’re left to our own devices.