In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes David B. Morris. In between twenty years as a self-employed writer, Morris held professorships at the University of Iowa, at the University of Virginia, and at Stanford University. His wider understanding of books and lives owes much to his wife, Ruth, a technical services librarian and library administrator, now retired and incurably ill, who holds a PhD in library and information science from the University of Michigan. This essay is written in her honor.

Photo by Odd :-) / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Disappearances

Lost & Un-Lost in Anne Carson’s Nox

“The book is perhaps the most charged, cathected object in Western civilization, representing, according to Freud’s analysis of his own dream of the botanical monograph, the Mother.”¹

Anne Carson almost always eventually circles back to eros. Her brilliantly inventive first book, Eros the Bittersweet, published in 1959, traced in classical Greek philosophy and literature a triangular geometry of desire: lover, beloved, and the gap or obstacle or space that separates them. This triangle, she argues, is basic not only to the earliest erotic verse but also to the emergence of the modern psyche. Nox, her latest book, if book is the right word for this unusual, resistant, boundary-crossing text, indirectly returns to eros in what is ostensibly an extended elegy or memorial or (as she once calls it) epitaph on the death of her brother.

Nox (Latin for “night”) focuses on loss, but the death of Carson’s Canadian-born brother (in faraway Copenhagen) is not the sole focus. Almost half the text—on the left-hand or verso page—is given over to an extended glossary on every word (one word per page) in a famous elegy by the Roman poet Catullus on the death of his brother (in faraway Asia). Moreover, while Nox follows these two parallel tracks, or parallel lost brothers, it also moves sideways to meditate on related issues, such as how writers or historians can ever truly understand a disappearing past. The collage-like fragments, in their poignant incompleteness, lend to Nox a philosophical and poetic texture that invites a questioning or meditative response. They immerse us in a semantic night where clarities vanish and mysteries emerge. What does this single death have to do with questions about time, loss, desire, writing, and disappearance? Above all, why does the book take such an unusual, cumbersome, and inconvenient material shape?

For starters, Nox arrives in a box. Further, the box does not contain what you’d expect—a bound text—but the pages are printed as adjacent sides of one continuous accordion-folded sheet. Right from the outset, then, without attributing intentions to Carson, readers might wish to understand Nox as a book that calls attention to its place in a history of books from which it conspicuously diverges. The history in fact is rapidly changing. It appears that printed books may soon survive mainly in niche or boutique markets, kept like classical scrolls in special collections or brought out like the Torah for use on ceremonial occasions. As readers and librarians today can’t help knowing, digital publication is transforming both the social environment and the material process within which reading occurs. For example:

• Amazon reports that its customers are buying bestsellers in e-book by a ratio of two to one over print. In the first nine months of 2010, it sold three times as many e-books as compared with the same period in 2009.²
• The Association of American Publishers says that print sales in the five major trade segments from reporting companies fell 7.5% in the period from January through September 2010, while e-book sales rose 188.4%.³

Nox—according to the meditative argument developed in what follows—is a book that in its material form stages an indirect but firm resistance to the disappearance of books.

A resistance to the disappearance of books in Nox coincides with the affirmation of what Carson once described as an “erotics of reading.” The circling back to eros has already begun. But what, exactly, is eros? This logically prior question, which deserves a response, can’t be answered with logic. Eros is the antagonist of logos. Logic and reason are its sworn enemies. Even when employed as a loose synonym for love or when merged with (its diminutive Roman counterpart) Cupid, eros entails a complex history that disrupts clear definitions. The early Greek poet Hesiod describes eros as the oldest of the gods: a primal cosmic creative force. In Plato’s Symposium several centuries later, eros has become a subject of debate—a debate interrupted, appropriately, when an uninvited, drunken lover breaks in looking for Socrates. Scholars today have reinvigorated the debate—after Freud’s influential opposition between eros and thanatos—but hardly settled it.⁴ The chief modern theorist of eros—librarian, writer, and polymath Georges Bataille—offers what he acknowledges is not a definition when he describes eroticism as like a life force: “assenting to life up to the point of death.”⁵

Eros—the center to Anne Carson’s wide circumference of multi-genre texts—is far easier to describe than to define, and Bataille offers two additional descriptions especially useful in thinking about Nox. First, he details how eros differs from animal sexuality in one crucial point: “it calls inner life into play.” It enlists consciousness, with its intricate deviations, in the service of libido. Second, Bataille exposes the dark and painful side of eros, where erotic pleasure and sexual passion, at their limits, make contact with various modes of destruction.⁶ “The whole business of eroticism,” he insists, “is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.”⁷ From classical lyric to tragedy, eros disrupts the consciousness that it calls into play. It rips apart normal lives and uproots communities. Not only is eros not identical with romantic love, but Eros regularly shatters settled love relations with casual flings and disastrous betrayals. It persists in love’s absence or in the death of love. The authoritative epithet for eros that Carson borrows from Sappho translates literally as “sweet-bitter” (glukupikron). The bittersweetness of eros is, for Carson, inseparable from her responses to a brother’s fatal disappearance.

Nox—a title just three letters short of disappearance—confronts loss without consolation. Elegists traditionally counter loss with forms of solace, as when Milton links the drowned shepherd Lycidas with the natural cycle of setting and rising suns. Lycidas (“sunk low, but mounted high”) rides the cycle of consolation to join the heavenly host who “wipe the tears forever from his eyes.” Carson’s bleak title erases hope—recalling the line from a famous erotic poem by Catullus in which the poet (pressing her to yield) invites his coy mistress to imagine the nothingness after death:

Soles occidere et redire possunt:

nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

The most famous translation of these lines is a gorgeous seduction speech in Ben Jonson’s dark jacobean comedy Volpone (1606):

Suns that set may rise again,

But if once we lose this light

‘Tis, with us, perpetual night.

Carson, as professor of classics, might forgive a small paroxysm of grammatical pedantry over a key word that disappears from Jonson’s translation: dormienda.

First-year Latin students, listen up. Future passive participles carry the sense of required action ahead: for example, agenda, from agere (= to set in motion, to do), means something that must be done. Dormienda (from dormire = to sleep) means not just sleeping but a sleep ahead that must be slept. Death for Catullus is no gentle goodnight, no Keatsian amorous embrace. It ends cycles. Zero heavenly host and zero regeneration. Death for Catullus is an endless (perpetua) unbroken (una) night that must be slept all the way through. Disappearance from the sunlit world (where to be is to appear) simply and utterly erases being. The enforced unending night thus permits no glimmer of hope or solace for survivors. Nox is not a writer’s inspirational journey through loss and grief to recovery. It is an act of resistance. Carson’s book, that is, takes a non-elegiac stand as a writer’s resistance to disappearance—disappearance of her brother, disappearance of books—in the form of a collage-like memorial built out of scraps and shards.

Nox resists disappearance not only in its collage-like compilation of semantic fragments but also, more important, in its material form. Readers must deal with Nox not only as a verbal text (signs woven into meanings) but also as a thing. “Things are what we encounter,” writes modernist Leo Stein, as quoted by the contemporary inventor of “thing-theory,” Bill Brown, “ideas are what we project.”⁸ What readers encounter, as we struggle with the thingy boxed continuous accordion-folded sheet, is less the projection of ideas than a book that cannot be opened. You can open the box all right, but not the text. The text can only be unfolded, like a classical scroll, or perhaps like meanings that cannot find a consensus, or like an endless night. We scroll down computer screens or flip virtual pages on e-readers with newfound ease, but nothing is easy about Nox. Nox shapes the experience of reading as an inescapable and radical estrangement from the familiar, everyday, previously unquestioned world of codex-style hard cover and paperback books.

The estrangement gets stranger as readers unfold the accordion-pleated text and encounter the facsimile of a scrapbook that Carson put together presumably with her own hands. Moreover, Nox employs advanced photo-technology to create the uncanny visual illusion that what we are reading is less a two-dimensional facsimile than a weirdly three-dimensional copy of the original scrapbook. Staples seem to poke up slightly above whatever material they affix. Pasted-on typed fragments of paper appear lifted slightly above the plane of the scrapbook page, with borders that look torn and textured, shadowed black on one side, white opposite, as if thick enough to catch the light. The rare accordion format, however, simultaneously calls attention to the secondary status of Nox as the cheap(ish) replica of a valuable absent original. Round black spots identify holes left when the scrapbook was un-sewn for photo-reproduction. The presence of the replica reminds us that something crucial is absent: a brother.

Nox as a material object also conveys what philosophers might call an implicit ontological argument: it shakes up our familiar idea of what books are. It is almost automatic to think of books as printed sheets (called leafs) folded and cut into pages and then fastened between covers. We also value books because of what we tend to think they are or do. Thus books often vouch for our good taste, knowledge, or skill. (Lawyers invariably choose law books as the backdrop for TV commercials.) Books provide self-help, religious truth, entertainment, whatever. Nox through its resistant strangeness (such as faux pages that won’t turn) helps to focus attention on books as material presences somehow caught up in an ontological dance, where words too are the trace of something absent: an idea, a meaning, a life. The insistent materiality of Nox includes vast blank grey stretches without print—a visual nothingness—that point toward disappearance, like the gaps in retouched Soviet-era photographs indicating where disgraced officials once stood. Nox in its imperfect material recovery of what is knowable about Carson’s shifty brother immerses readers (as meanings recede and questions grow) in an experience akin to what happens in a detective novel. Narrative threads emerge, vanish, reappear. Images turn blurry. Data is impossible to decipher. Nothing is quite what it seems. It is easy to get lost in the dense materiality of the text. Understanding becomes inescapably interruptive: a continuous process of negotiation with disappearances.

Carson is a connoisseur of disappearance. Disappearance in fact is a state that she invests with almost philosophical significance, albeit rooted in everyday life. Think of a lover watching the tail-lights disappear as his beloved slowly drives off into the darkness, forever. Disappearance marks a transitional moment—a unit of time, fast or slow—when something passes from presence to absence. It is similar to the relatively static state that Carson elsewhere calls “unlost.” Unlost, for example, is the epithet that she applies to an ancient figure known only in a brief epitaph composed by the poet Simonides of Keos. “Spinther,” as Carson gives us his name, “would have vanished utterly save for a single Simonidean line of verse.”⁹ The state of total vanishment—no trace whatever—is oblivion. Disappearance, by contrast, remains just this side of nothingness: identified mainly by the traces it leaves behind. It can encompass both the static twilight survival of an unknown figure such as Spinther (a name you can grow fond of) or the transitional movement as lovers drive away into the darkness, out of sight, out of memory, out of being. Disappearance and its traces always traffic with the border of total vanishment and of unending night. What fate likely awaits Carson’s undistinguished, semi-anonymous brother without a sister to slow his disappearance?

Disappearances in Nox raise the stakes higher than a sisterly desire to mourn and to remember a lost brother. The scrappy details evoke larger, even mythic patterns of family drama. Carson—writer, professor, international star—is the good child. Her brother is the archetypal bad child. Nox tells us that he fled abroad as a fugitive from Canadian law and in the next twenty years spoke with his sister barely five times, by phone. She recalls, with something less than sibling affection, how he addressed her as pinhead and professor. Which child—good daughter or prodigal son—did the mother love more? A scribbled note from her mother strongly suggests that Carson as good child composes this memorial for the family bad sheep whom his mother, we infer, preferred. (Sons and Mothers.) Here and elsewhere in her work, empathy is not the particular circle of eros that Carson inhabits. Her brother has been disappearing for years. Death simply makes his disappearance official. It also loads his pinhead sister (a MacArthur “genius” award recipient) with the familial or writerly obligation to save his memory from total darkness through a movement into the twilight realm of the unlost.

The lost brother of Catullus remains a total blank, as Carson explains in Nox, unknown except that Catullus addresses him (as “brother”) in a memorable poem. Through the poem, however, he is not utterly forgotten. Unlost, in Carson’s neologism. No, grief and family love aren’t strong presences in Nox but rather notable absences. Carson tellingly compares herself to historians or archaeologists, patiently patching together bits and pieces of a past that never yields full understanding. Nox offers its extensive glossary of cognate Latin passages illuminating every word—including et (“and”)—in Catullus’s elegy on his brother almost as a substitute for absent emotion, as if to assert the counter-claims of knowledge, even if knowledge always falls short of full understanding. In Nox, loss may be resisted but not overcome. Despite her word-by-word glossary, Carson makes it clear that knowledge and scholarship cannot convey the lost power of Catullus’s elegy. She includes her own translation largely, as she indicates, as a testament to the losses that no English version can hope to escape.

Loss and disappearance extend to books as well as to poems and brothers. Books are never directly addressed in Nox, but Carson’s text cannot escape its place within a landscape where the book as a historical, material invention linked to the Gutenburg revolution now faces imminent disappearance with the rise of electronic publishing. Arguably, Nox mounts a complex resistance to the disappearance of books, in that it appears irreproducible in digital format. Any future effort to reproduce Nox as an e-book will necessarily alter its material form and reshape the experience of the reader, much as when sculpture is reproduced in photographs. Readers of Nox—which in its tactile, sculptural qualities might equally be described as text-based art—cannot simply process words and unpack meanings. Nox exists only as a large accordion-folded sheet encased in a tomb-like box, creating an unwieldy, inconvenient presence that slows down and impedes understanding. Is it significant that you cannot, for love or money, buy a copy of Nox for your Kindle or iPad?

There is an unavoidable problem here, however. Suppose that Nox asserts an implicit or tacit claim for the indispensable presence of books in our lives. What significant purpose is served by a resistance to digital format? Machine-printed hard-cover or paperback books belong to a receding past as surely as do broadside poems hand-lettered on parchment (although small presses still produce limited runs for special occasions, of course). The poems of Catullus, which presumably circulated in the ancient world on scrolls, survive today only because someone transcribed them into a codex manuscript discovered in Verona around 1305. (This single copy disappeared again, but not before spawning two additional copies—one preserved in the Bodleian.) Only the transformation from scroll to codex saved the poetry of Catullus. Moreover, new technologies for reproducing texts often expand readership, as the printing press once did. If Nox stakes an implicit claim for books as material objects or presences, how is this claim much more than an expression of elitist nostalgia or luddite hostility?

Re-enter eros. The love of books is no platonic affair conducted purely on the plane of minds. Books and lives go hand in hand. Losses in one realm carry across the divide. What bibliophiles prize—rich paper, fine inks, colorful illustrations, artful dust jackets, hand-tooled leather—belongs securely to the realm of the senses. Equally important, books are irreducible to containers for thought. The historical circulation of radical ideas depended on the materiality of books and on their power to generate new forms of knowledge, much as the Encylopédie (with its alphabetic format, subversive cross-references, and defiance of state censorship) helped fuel the French Revolution.¹⁰ Contemporary poets have made the materiality of poems—as in sound poetry, concrete poetry, and so-called “found” poetry—integral to a new poetics.¹¹ If philosophers seem very willing to disjoin meanings and arguments from materiality, Carson—philosopher and poet—refuses to separate sense and meaning from the poetic materiality of books.

The love of books as material objects, beyond any taste for fine bindings or costly first editions, includes for many people a feeling for their place as companions on the human journey: artifacts inseparable from their heft and feel, objects that follow us to each new residence, pushing us to buy or build cases to hold them like household lares and penates. Gerald L. Bruns argues, as he explores contemporary theories of poetry, that poems somehow address and enhance our connection to the world of things and indeed assert “an intimacy with mere things that defeats explanation.”¹² Books too, in their thingness. Nox may well stimulate this intimacy. Who hasn’t felt a mysterious pleasure at holding the exact edition of a book you read as a child. The Little Engine That Could, say, in its 1930 red cloth cover with applied paper illustration by Lois Lenski. Dog-eared corners, under-linings, marginal comments, forgotten bookmarks, even faded cash register receipts signify how books intersect our lives at particular moments. Books as objects accompany us as we learn, change, and age. Brittle yellowed pages, beyond exposing the cheap paper used at a particular moment in the mass-production of consumable texts, also reflects a process through which certain old books become old friends. Some books we will never part with. In years gone by, the family Bible was more than a sacred text. It was a local register, a moral anchor, an heirloom. Resistance to the disappearance of books is the flip side of an erotic affirmation of everything (personal, social, historical) that books once stood for.

Fair enough. But e-publication holds significant and off-setting gains. The Dutch are currently embarked on a project to digitalize every book published in Dutch from 1470 to the present.¹³ No book published in Dutch will go out of print—or disappear into oblivion. Google books today are available online at the click of a mouse. College students like the convenience and lower cost of digital textbooks, updated regularly and shutting down the bone yards of obsolete prior editions. The Facebook and Twitter generations—natives of the photon—take to new media like virtual ducks to virtual water. Adults fifty years hence may remember with fondness books they read late at night tapping the screen of their iPads. If the material, social history of the book helps account for the particular writing that, say, Marcel Proust and Henry James regarded as possible, e-books create new conditions of possibilities for writing—and for reading—such as hypertext links or embedded programs (some already create textual changes each time we open the file). The future of reading will not cling to hard covers and cut pages but continue to change. Something more crucial than historical forms is at stake.

“Every time a poet writes a poem,” as Carson generalizes, “he is asking the question, Do words hold good: And the answer has to be yes….”¹⁴ This statement is unclear about what it means to say that words “hold good.” It is legitimate to ask what specific values words might affirm when they hold good. What particular breakdowns occur when words fail? The goodness of poetic language certainly doesn’t inhere in its truth, not even in its postmodern, pluralized, contingent truths. Few philosophers today would argue for a one-to-one correspondence between language and truth. The question Do words hold good? remains an open-ended provocation to thought, not a query in search of a note. A response appropriate to Carson might predictably circle back toward eros. “I would like to grasp,” Carson wrote in a rare autobiographical moment amid the comp-lit erudition of Eros the Bittersweet, “why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them.”¹⁵

Falling in love and coming to know. Learning and love are for Carson parallel and related experiences. What connects them is the erotic impulse that imparts a feeling of aliveness. Words might hold good, in this context, when they make contact with eros and promote a feeling of aliveness. Eros against Thanatos. Words hold good, in an erotic sense, in their opposition to death and to what Coleridge called death-in-life. Eros against Nox. Writer against Disappearance. Primal opponents. Words that hold good would be inseparable from the electrifications of love and of knowledge. When words fail to hold good, they do nothing, perform no work, touch no one, or else play to everything that deadens us. When a writer’s words hold good, whatever else they do in Carson’s multi-genre poetics, they promote aliveness and maintain a vital contact with eros.

A love of reading inflects eros in a slightly different register than does the love of material books. Reading, although we think of it as personal and subjective, has a rich social history, now rapidly changing under the pressure of e-books. The term “visual reader” tellingly transfers the term reader from the person who reads to the electronic device, and such devices absorb the reading of books into the same environment as video-games, internet apps, and communicative functions, from text messages to social networks. People seem to be reading more today, thanks in large part to blogs and to various interactive opportunities that link writers and readers. Eros will doubtless inflect reading in new registers, as books lose their distinctive identity and swim or compete within a largely undifferentiated new sea of discourse. This sea, albeit still emergent, at least defines the fluid field against which Nox contemplates both a brother’s death and larger cultural disappearances for which books serve as a recent and potent metaphor. Science fiction has long imagined forms of instant communication far more certain and more erotic (in the power to convey feeling and to connect people) than reading. The speculation cannot be ruled out that reading too—a brain-based historical invention that is in fact neurologically distinct from it historical twin, writing—might one day disappear.

Disappearance, according to cultural theorist Paul Virilio, takes on special significance in modern societies characterized by a radical emphasis on speed. The extreme pace of change introduces not only specific new inventions but also a personal and cultural experience of continual vanishings.¹⁶ Witness the rapid disappearance of land-line telephones, typewriters, letters home, virginity, drive-in theaters, diseases, nations…. The disappearance is not total or immediate. Some phenomena (from the Greek root meaning to appear) linger among the unlost, in museums or old movies, much like 1950s Chevrolets cruising the streets of twenty-first century Havana. Virilio sees developed economies as creating what he calls an “epileptic consciousness”—a jolting experience of gaps and absences as things vanish before our eyes, not even waving goodbye. Like Carson’s brother. Suddenly gone. This epileptic consciousness of vanishment, whatever its psychological costs and benefits, at least creates the conditions basic to what Carson describes as the triangular geometry of desire. Disappearances—like a lover’s absence—are custom-made for the appearance of eros.

Eros thrives on imagining what isn’t there, which is of course the entire project of Nox. What is erotic about reading (or writing), as Carson puts it, “is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge.”¹⁷ Eros for Carson is inseparable from desire, and desire always implies absence and lack. The literal absences and gaps in the text of Nox keep firm or full knowledge always just beyond reach, while the resistant materiality of the book affirms its own paradoxical presence. Presence, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht writes, identifies a realm beyond meaning.¹⁸ In contrast to a postmodern focus on meanings and on cognitive indeterminacies, presence gestures toward a crucial dimension of embodied human experience that interposes a space between know-ers and the objects or knowledge. Nox in effect calls forth an erotic play of imagination in the space that presence opens up—as in dance or music—where meanings are less important than their inadequacies.

An erotics of reading may provide an effective description of the engagement with language in which words, for Carson, ultimately hold good. Words hold good, it appeared, when they make contact with eros and promote a feeling of aliveness. Now it is possible to add, more specifically, that words hold good when they are sufficient to spark the electrifications that Carson describes as falling in love and as coming to know. These particular electrifications, however, do not require material books in codex form. Audiences fall in love with the electronic images of movie stars, just as lonely singles fall for attractive faces on Match.com, where presence and absence take a different configuration than in books. The darkness of movie theaters has long constituted an erotic space that lovers enjoy as much as film buffs do, and of course the internet has as its most popular feature the uncensored access to online pornography. Eros shifts and freewheels easily across media. Arguably, John Donne and Wallace Stevens lose nothing in meaning or power—and they may gain much from hypertext notes and online comments—when their poems appear on a screen instead of on a paper page.

Sappho is Carson’s prime exemplar of the electrifications of falling in love, but the erotics of learning for Carson finds its exemplary figure in Socrates. It was Socrates who famously claimed that eros was the only subject he knew anything about. Plato’s Symposium and Phaderus are the dialogues in which Socrates most fully develops his views on eros, and as Carson works through the sometime paradoxical details in Eros the Bittersweet she emphasizes the Socratic argument that eros and desire necessarily plunge lovers into the world of time and of matter. You cannot engage eros, despite the many fruitless attempts to do so, from a position of cool detachment. Eros assures that you cannot avoid getting your hands dirty, your heart broken. Count on it. There is no insurance policy to protect you—whether you are a world-famous writer or merely her unknown brother—against death and unending night. Socrates is most relevant to a reading of Nox, however, less for his specific arguments about eros than for his embodiment of what Emerson called “man thinking.” It is his passion for thought—not his specific ideas—that for Carson connect Socrates with the electrifications of eros. As she pinpoints his erotic character: “He loved, that is, the process of coming to know.”¹⁹

How exactly does coming-to-know constitute an erotic activity? And what does coming–to-know as an erotic activity have to do with Nox? “In any act of thinking,” Carson writes, “the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.”²⁰ Thought electrified. Electronic reproduction cannot convey exactly what the mind must encounter as we hold and peruse a copy of Nox in its strange and resistant material form. True, an erotics of coming-to-know is already breaking new ground as words and images and sound combine on the screen in previously unimagined hybrid creations. Yet, as twenty-first century minds reach across the new space opening between the book as we once knew it and a more rarefied new-media materiality of silicon and of electrons, elegiac voices remind us of the losses and seek ways to resist it. “Please,” implores musician and memoirist Patti Smith on receiving a 2010 National Book Award, “no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”²¹ Eros is notorious for its attraction to beauty. Suddenly gone. Against a backdrop of endless night, Anne Carson—through a book, if it is a book, that resists the disappearance of the printed book—is left to think the abrupt, irreversible disappearance of a brother who wasn’t, truly, much of a brother and whose memory is fading fast. Will her words hold good?

My deepest thanks for their help to Brett Bonfield, Kate Chieco, Brian Dietz, Paula Levine, Christopher Morris, Kenneth Reckford, and Markus Wust.

1. Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied grammatology: post(e-)pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). p. 13.
2. Rachel Deahl, “How E-book Sales Compare to Print … So Far,” Publishers Weekly, 1 November 2010, p. 4.
3. Jim Milliot, “Print Declines Offset Digital Gains,” Publishers Weekly, 15 November 2010, p. 11.
4. For an exemplary collection, see Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
5. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 29. First published in French in 1957; the first English translation appeared under a different title in 1962.
6. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989). First published in French in 1961.
7. Bataille, Erotism, p. 17.
8. Leo Stein, The A-B-C of Aesthetics (1927), quoted in Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1-22.
9. Anne Carson, The Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 82.
10. See Philipp Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, The Book That Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
11. See Gerald L. Bruns, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
12. Bruns, The Material of Poetry, p. 9.
13. Robert Darnton, “Can We Create a National Digital Library?”, New York Review of Books, 28 October 2010. www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library. Accessed 16 December 2010.
14. Carson, Economy of the Unlost, p. 121.
15. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (1986; rpt. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), p. 70.
16. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(3), 2009). First published in French in 1980.
17. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 109.
18. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
19. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 171.
20. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 171.
21. Quoted in Julie Bosman, “National Book Award for Patti Smith,” New York Times, 17 November 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/books/18awards.html?_r=1&ref=nationalbookawards. Accessed 6 January 2011.

Photo by Flickr member Bill Gracey

Recently I found out that it could be happening to all of us: Google and the Internet as a medium could indeed be changing the ways our brains function and process information. “As Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, “media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Carr’s article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” received some attention for accusing its readers of not being able to accomplish deep, sustained reading in the age of the Internet. According to the article, the Web is reprogramming our brains in a fundamental, biological way. (Note: for a smart, satirical look at the issue, check out Stephen Colbert’s interview with Carr).

The responses to Carr’s article came from both sides of the fence: those who agreed with with him and those who objected to the perceived insult to their intelligence. The Chronicle of Higher Education came out with three articles that expressed concern and agreement: “Your Brain on Google,” a compilation of somewhat ironic quotes from the Web, “On Stupidity,” an extended book review of “a cartload” of recent books on anti-intellectualism, and “On Stupidity, Part 2,” an English professor’s response to the problem. Meanwhile, The New York Times Technology section printed a counterpoint by Damon Darlin, “Technology Doesn’t Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds,” that accused Carr of being a technophobe and insisted that “writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.”

The irony of the entire argument is encapsulated in the first two lines of the New York Times article: “Everyone has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article.” Darlin builds the satire by attempting to sum up Carr’s article in a Twitter “tweet” of less than 140 characters, but only skims the surface of the real irony: the likely truth that very few of the people discussing Carr’s article had been able to read the whole thing. There’s something amazing and a bit disturbing about a culture in which everyone’s opinion is equally important and valid, no matter whether or not one has even a basic knowledge of the subject.

As an academic librarian, I’m particularly interested in the implications for libraries of Carr’s article. Hand in hand with Carr’s concern about a growing inability to engage in deep reading is the equal possibility of a growing inability to engage in sustained research. Google leads us to believe that searching for information is easy when library research is complex, often frustrating, and full of twists and turns. So the next question is: does it have to be that way? It’s a given that library systems tend to be overly complicated, even for simple searches. The common refrain is: how can we be more like Google?

The followup question is: do we want to?

These days academic libraries are grasping at every possible product—from federated searching to LibraryThing—that might ease our students’ apparent impatience with the challenges of research. After all, the 2002 Pew Internet & American Life report, “The Internet Goes to College,” made it clear that our students rely on the Web first when they’re doing research, and generally use the library only as a latter resort. If academic libraries don’t make it easier for students to find relevant information for their course projects, they may not come at all. We may as well just hand Google Scholar the keys.

On the other hand, a recent study of the research practices of college students in the humanities and social sciences offered more heartening results. Alison J. Head’s article, “Beyond Google” in First Monday (later written up for September 2008’s College & Research Libraries) found that students are using libraries in greater numbers—and earlier in their searches—than the Pew Research Center would have us believe. Granted this was a study at a single, small, liberal arts college that doesn’t necessarily reflect the situation everywhere. But we can glean some optimism from the study, along with the requisite grain of salt.

On the positive side, academic libraries have the benefit of a captive audience of students whose professors often require the use of library resources. While we may hope that these requirements train students in the ways of deep research, the day-to-day interactions at any academic reference desk would indicate otherwise. Instead, a majority of students reflect a desire to find adequate sources for a given project as soon as possible, even if those sources are not ideal. Is it Google that has raised their expectations for how quickly an information search can be accomplished? A study from the British Library calls this a “truism in the age in which we live” that “crosses all generational boundaries in the digital environment…. The speed of new media has cultivated a lowered tolerance for delay.” The study goes on to say:

There is considerable evidence to support the view that many students do not explore information in any deep or reflective manner. The lack of any evaluative efforts on the part of information users has been documented…. According to Levin and Arafeh (2002) most students stop searching at ‘good enough’ rather than trying to find the best source etc. Some ‘view the Internet as a way to complete their schoolwork as quickly and painlessly as possible, with minimal effort and minimal engagement.’

English professor Thomas H. Benton’s personal observations are nearly identical. In “On Stupidity, Part 2,” he writes:

Essentially I see students having difficulty following or making extended analytical arguments. In particular, they tend to use easily obtained, superficial, and unreliable online sources as a way of satisfying minimal requirements for citations rather than seeking more authoritative sources in the library and online. Without much evidence at their disposal, they tend to fall back on their feelings, which are personal and, they think, beyond questioning.

The echo of Carr’s article in both of these quotes is unmistakable. Whether or not Google is actually changing the biology of our brains it is difficult to say, but it does seem possible that Google could be damaging our students’ ability or inclination to conduct real research.

I’m not blaming our students. It is not the fault of anyone in particular if they are losing the interest and ability to conduct complex research. They are products of their culture, just as we all are. Just as I am.

In fact, those of us currently in our early to mid-thirties are in a unique position to address this issue. You see, I didn’t grow up with computers, but computers and I grew up together. I can remember, back in grade school, Atari and I bumbling our way through Asteroids. In high school, America Online and I had our first heady experiences in online chat rooms. When I went to college my library’s young OPAC was incomplete and I still had to use the card catalog to find certain items. Computers were leaking into my research in college, but their effect was fragmented. Google was founded the year I graduated from college.

I grew up with computers, but I grew up knowing that they were fickle, fallible, and constantly changing. I still have a collection of old floppy disks with files I will never be able to access again. I greatly enjoy technology, but I maintain a certain skepticism about it.

That said, I had to make a conscious effort to read Nicholas Carr’s article all the way through. The first time I linked to it, I skimmed the first few paragraphs and bookmarked it. The second time, I skimmed further into the text. I didn’t actually read the whole thing until I chuckled at Darlin’s observation on how few had read it and realized that I was not one of them.

What happens to our libraries in a culture where sustained reading and deep research are skills that our students and patrons increasingly do not value? There is no easy answer, but the most critical thing we can do is reflect passion for our work and share it with our students. Benton writes, “Effective teaching requires embodying the joy of learning — particularly through lectures and spirited discussions — that made us become professors in the first place. It’s extremely hard, but teachers have been doing it for generations.”

Notice his admission that playing such a role is “extremely hard”; we can all appreciate his honesty there. It is hard to be an intellectual in a culture that values actors over educators. It is hard to face a constant onslaught of superficial research when we know how much richer and more inspiring information can be. But the payoff comes when we open the door and a student steps through, leaving Google aside for the moment, to consider the wealth of research tools at their disposal that they never knew existed.

If only it happened more often.

Many thanks to my ITLWTLP colleagues Derik and Brett, and to Rick Stoddart, Tom Hillard, Ellie Dworak, and Elaine Watson for offering feedback that helped shape this post.