Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Recent, Relevant, Random

Episode Date: July 25, 2014

We don’t have metrics to measure what happens when we read something that changes our life. So this episode is an attempt to deal with that.  We begin with writer Rob Walker who tells us about his “New Old Thing,”  a regular feature he produces for Yahoo Tech. Rob is one of the most thoughtful writers I know and if anyone can wean us from our addiction to the now it will be him. I also get to talk to one of my heros this week: Edwin Frank who is the editor in chief of the NYRB classics imprint. About 10 years ago I read a collection of Platonov stories, a book that definitely changed my life, and I became a life-long devotee of the series. I have always wanted to ask Edwin about his editorial sensibilities and what exactly binds all the books with the well designed multi-coloured spines together. Phyllis Rose is the author of The Shelf.  She “randomly” chose a shelf at the library near her house and read every book on it – then she wrote about the experience. It is a deep funny philosophical treatise on the act of reading itself. I will be gifting this book to my friends for years.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Recent Relevant Random. It's easy to be like, well, what is everyone going to be wanting to know about tomorrow when the new iPad comes out? They're going to be wanting to know about the new iPad, right? So we need to be there with something to say about the new iPad. That's not a difficult editorial proposition. And if it didn't work, they would stop. But it does work. Rob Walker writes about how technology is changing the way we live, the way we think, and the way we consume.

He says it's getting harder and harder for working technology journalists like himself to escape the churning whirlpool of gadget stories. Because metrics. It's very easy to measure if something gets a thousand tweets. But when we read something that blows our minds or changes how we see the world, are there metrics for that? I have articles that I've ripped out of the physical New Yorker and that I've put in a folder and I've reread three times over the period of a year. And there's no way to measure that. There's no metric.

There's no easy, clickable thing. And I think that that stuff is just totally falling by the wayside. If you think about it, you don't walk around every day reminding people like, hey, Native Son changed my life. Like if Native Son changed your life, it changed your life, period. And that's a big deal. And you might talk about that from time to time, but not in the hot sense that social media is meant to reward. One of Rob's regular columns at Yahoo Tech is called The New Old Thing. Every installment is like a gentle reproach, a reminder that we have become slaves to the recent.

If I think about what is great about the existence of the Internet and the web and things like that, one of the things is not what's happening now, but just like what randomly occurs to you that you can look up, what you have access to. You have access to infinite stuff from the past. You can look up, and I encourage people to look up Patti Smith singing on some children's show in like the 70s. Well, I want to sing, You Light Up My Life.

Go ahead, Patti. Now, there's no news hook around that. That's just cool. It's awesome. It's a good thing. And I think that's a way that a lot of us in real life use the web and enjoy the web. When I'm trying to address the recent, I'm trying to, as best I can, find ways to do it in a manner that has some durability beyond the present moment.

Sometimes I guess it's chased by my own random interests. I had one recently where I had listened to a podcast about ABBA and somehow in the court and I was like, I'm so sick of hearing about ABBA, but then they sort of mentioned in passing, like like what is the album someone should get after they have ABBA gold and it was like oh wow I guess there was other stuff like what are the unheard ABBA songs so I spent a day on Spotify listening to unheard ABBA and made a playlist of my favorite things. I think that the hidden value of that in some ways is that you didn't have to be there that day. If you weren't there the day that the new iPad reviews came out, you probably don't really care.

If you weren't there the day that my Abba Bronze, was what I called that, came out, you could go look it up now now and it's just as good. It's timeless. Personally, I doubt we'll ever come up with metrics able to measure the importance of what Rob is calling durable media. Sure, computers will continue to count likes and retweets so they can better recommend stuff for us to buy.

But expressing the true measure of something relevant, that's our job. It's just undeniably true that we have a lot more choice in terms of finding what's relevant to us as individuals. So it's almost more important than ever that we just remember that the recent, the now, the hot isn't the only game in town. And that it's really critically important to be playing that role of looking beyond that and championing the thing that, geez, I don't understand why everyone doesn't love this. I love it. Well, then stand up and say so. And that's cool. And it's cool even if it's not new,

even if it's like I discovered whatever, Patti Smith singing this thing. Champion that. There's a way in which discovery is a good part of the editorial job. Edwin Frank is the editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books Classic. The things that please me most are the books that I discover that I haven't read that come my way and that sort of change the way I think about what books could do or just introduce a great new book. The NYRB Classics is a growing collection of out-of-print books, foreign translations, forgotten masterpieces, and books that just never got their due the first time around. And while I probably have over 100 books from this series, I could not tell you what binds them together

other than their well-designed, multicolored spines. So I decided to ask Edwin. My usual line of how do we select books rigorously by whim. That's the same flip answer he gives to everyone who asks. But I'm going to cut him some slack, because I appreciate just how difficult it is to talk about an editorial sensibility that includes, well, everything. I'm interested in mixing things up, old with new, fiction with nonfiction.

I wanted to have a list that would draw in readers saying, wow, that was a favorite book of mine. Maybe these other books, which I've never heard of, might be interesting too. This is definitely what happened when I read a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Andrei Platonov, one of the first books Edwin put in his series. My encounter with Platonov transformed me into a devoted and proselytizing NYRB classics reader. Turns out Platonov had a strong effect on Edwin, too. When he was in high school, he got a copy from his father's best friend, who was in the CIA.

I read the story, which we now publish under the title of Soul, and it's an absolutely astonishing story, completely unlike anything else I'd ever read, that had the kind of, that was new the way Kafka must have been new when Kafka was first published. And there was no question that when we began the series, that this was one of the books that I wanted to do. The success of the NYRB Classics is kind of mind-blowing, considering that the publishing industry itself is crashing and burning. It's proof that book culture still has a future. When we began, for example, nobody would pay attention to a reprint of a book. Now you will look at the nation and they will give their lead review to a reprint of a book from 50 years ago,

and people, somebody will talk very thoughtfully about it. So in a way, there's a kind of a large, enlarged attention amongst the active readership that corresponds to the threatened position of book culture. One of the most popular new old books that Edwin's published so far is John William Stoner, a book that barely sold a few hundred copies when it was first published in 1965. Now it's an international phenomenon and a bestseller. Stoner now succeeds at a level that people who are reading other books on the bestseller list

and so on can be also seen picking that one up. It would be a mistake, though, to say Edwin Frank isn't interested in what's going on now. Okay, I doubt the new iPad has influenced any of his editorial choices. Actually, I can't even say that with any certainty. You never know with him. But the recent most definitely factors in. When we started our latest round of feudal wars, one of the things I remember saying is we're going to be, you know, war is going to be a topic for some time.

And we did Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad and war. And we did Alistair Horne's book about the Algerian Revolution, which also dealt with the French use of torture, which ended up to our amazement on George Bush's desk. We hoped that he would read the end rather than the beginning and not simply say what a great idea the French had. Maybe he did in the long run. But did the Alistair Horne book inspire George Bush to pick up another NYRB Classics volume?

And are the thousands of people who've now read Stoner as devoted to the NYRB as I am after reading Platano? Or does the if-you-like-this-then-you-will-like-that algorithm only work with detective novels and dystopian young adult trilogies? I don't just want to bring readers books that they know already they would like. For Edwin Frank, the algorithm is if you liked this unexpected life-changing experience, then I have a bunch more for you. And this, I think, is what binds all of the books with the well-designed, multi-colored spines on my bookshelf together. I'll confirm this when I'm finished reading. Three years ago, I had a moment that I think everybody,

many people who are book lovers have at some point, which is they look around, they're in the stacks, they see books all around them, and they say to themselves, I want to read them all. Phyllis Rose is a book critic, essayist, memoirist, and biographer. Quickly, of course, you realize you can't read all the books in the library. So I decided to read one shelf. My idea was I would pick a shelf at random and read my way through it.

Phyllis really did choose a shelf at the New York Society Library. That's the library closest to her home on the Upper East Side. But it's a bit of a stretch to call that choice random. You know, I wasn't going to get the ladder to go up to the top, really. She excluded all the high shelves. She excluded all the low shelves. She excluded all the shelves filled with detective novels. Every month, the New York Society Library buys as many detective novels

as it buys all other kinds of fiction. Phyllis created all kinds of rules. Her shelf couldn't have too many books by the same author. Her shelf had to have more than one woman writer. Rules are necessary, but you can invent them ad infinitum. You can just make them up as you wish. So I invented the rule that there had to be a classic. A classic that this esteemed professor of literature had never read. And that was hard to find. But eventually I found one. It's A Hero of Our Time, which is an early 19th century Russian novel by Lermontov. And that is what led me to choose the L-E-Q to L-E-S shelf. In her new book, The Shelf, Phyllis Rose documents her off-road reading experience.

It's a very serious, deeply philosophical examination of the act of reading itself. Why we do it, how we do it. If I'm bored with a book, I'll go to the internet. Yeah. Phyllis Rose is going to make you feel a lot better about the way you read, too. And I'll look until I find something that attracts my interest, either something biographical about the writer or a video clip of the writer's funeral. Etienne Larue was a South African writer who was known for his experimental anti-apartheid fiction.

Phyllis had a hard time connecting with his writing until she watched his funeral on YouTube. I do think that we read, well, I read, let me say, at least to some extent for intimacy and for connection with the writer. And this was a weird way of getting intimacy, seeing his funeral, but it really worked. Phyllis even meets up with some of the writers on her shelf, like Rhoda Lerman, an American writer who wrote a number of dark and satirical novels in the 1970s and 80s. These books were sensationally reviewed, and I just couldn't figure out why she had stopped

writing. I was so interested in her career, and I didn't understand why it hadn't gone somewhere. So I thought I'd get in touch with her and ask her. I learned what happened. She never really built up an audience base because each book was so different. And in order to build up an audience, you really have to, you have to give them more of what you've already given them. You have to be predictable to a certain extent. And Rhoda wasn't. Every single book she wrote was different from the one she'd written before. So she couldn't make a living.

And she and her husband turned to raising Newfoundlands, which is what she does now. There are many writers out there who don't make it into the canon, who aren't taught in college courses, but who are extremely good and very serious writers and have devoted their life to writing fiction. That's what I wanted to explore, what I call the real ground of literature, not the part that has been sifted and that has been stamped with various kinds of approval, but the kinds that have fallen through the sieve. And to me, it's very touching because it's so good and because the people who write these books are so gifted.

There are a number of talented writers on Phyllis's shelf, writers who never got their due. And then there's William LeCue. The books on my shelf by LeCue were hands down the worst. The worst. LeCue was famous for his detective stories starring the debonair Duckworth Drew, an obvious precursor of James Bond. In fact, the young Ian Fleming was a rabid William Lequeu fan. But most boys reading in the early 1900s were. He was one of the first writers

to sell a million copies. Lequeu might just prove the existence of literary karmic justice. It does have significance for me that the worst writer on the shelf was in his own time one of the most successful. I don't doubt Phyllis' assessment of William Lequeux, but I added his name to my to-read list anyway. I actually added almost every single writer on Phyllis' shelf to my list. And I'm sure many of her readers will do the same.

But it would be a mistake to view The Shelf as a book about forgotten or neglected writers. The Shelf is not a recommendation app. The Shelf is about discovery. And no, there is not an app for that. I am talking about reading for yourself, choosing your own reading, choosing it even arbitrarily as an extreme way of asserting your freedom. More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations. Explore something, even if it's

just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispose of it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for and then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Recent Relevant Random.

The show was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker. Bill Bowen mixed the program, that's why it sounds better, and we had production assistance from Ethan Cheal. He also compiled the Medium page. You can find that at toe.prx.org. Actually, it's all one-stop shopping there. You can sign up for the newsletter and subscribe to the podcast. The Theory of Everything is part of Radiotopia from the Public Radio Exchange. Radiotopia is the world's best podcast network.