26-Letters Arranged To Change
Upon glancing at my bookshelf, which isn’t really a shelf at all as opposed to piles of books on my floor, I realized how many books I had that suggested, if not demanded, a complete shift in my behavior and routines to become a more civilized and enlightened person. Simply, my books were pointing and laughing at me. Some were screaming angrily. Although the personalities of the pages were different, they all said the same thing: you are wrong and you will burn. Unless you change the very foundation of your being. This will require a bit of explaining I believe.
The three books that grabbed my attention the most (or maybe screamed the loudest) were “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, “The End Of Faith” by Sam Harris and “Female Chauvinist Pigs” by Ariel Levy. For those not acquainted with these three volumes I suggest that you copy/paste their names into amazon.com and read a synopsis. However I don’t think that will be necessary for understanding what they talk about.(Or rather, scream about.) Each book is alike in the sense that they are social commentaries criticizing some aspect of society, being it corporations, religion or warped sex-laden female stereotypes respectively. And these are not the only ones around. Not by a long shot…..
Books are the new logos of our time. They embed catchy titles followed by an interesting cover designed and re-designed to attract their target audiences like some sort of hybrid between a Venus fly trap and a road-side prostitute. I can’t really blame editors and writers for employing these types of tactics, after all, with almost universal literacy the market is a tough one to break through into. Any crack-addicted monkey with a typewriter can write a book, or anything for that matter as this post probably illustrates. The craft of writing which in the sepia tone of retrospect seemed a noble and prestigious occupation that only the most talented or the most outrageously obscene could possible compete in is gone. This is good in one hand as it allows the masses to have their tales written and typed and printed which will always mean that something good is bound to be found in ones local bookstore, if not simply because of the vast amount of print around means something obscene, sex-ridden and completely offensive will be able to wiggle its way out. However this does mean drowning in an ocean of ink and Tom Clancy to be able to get to it. The irony.
Alas, I digress. Yes, the conceptual parasite. So we have the book with a name more attractive than a hookers and a cover to boot and then we finally get to what we purchased. The 26-letter cocktail arranged to change. The mind, that is. And this is were it really starts to get good: books that tell you to stop buying stuff so that people you will never meet can have a better life, the books that tell you to stop worshiping god since it is inadvertently causing “TEOTWAWKI” and to stop telling girls they look good in their news tops since you are in some way calling them sluts. Or hookers. Or at least comparing them to a class of individuals that are seen as “bad”. And so on until you reach the book saying that a fish has feelings and have rights just the same as your best friends. Like I’m going to have a big moral debate in my head about which to kill first when the nukes start dropping and I need food: fishy or Ted.
My main point has nothing to do with this. There are as many opinions as there are people and lah lah lah and people will write about them no matter what. This is the hook: the people who write these books probably don’t care the slightest bit if you decide not to change your life after reading their opuses since you did what they wanted you to do the second you walked out of the store: you bought the damn book. From there it is only a small nice warm feeling they get when people arrange protests and burn stuff after being tainted by their ideas. If you were to ask any starting writer if they would rather have a best-seller right away or write the next Bible that will be cherished for millenia and held as the absolute tome of truth after they are rotten corpses in rotten boxes, 99% will take the best-seller. The rest are just lying.
Since writing a book doesn’t require much anymore in terms of material, and maybe to an extent originality, you can rest assured that more and more and more books will be vomited forth by publishers to tarnish the reading general with ideals to strive for. An idea is so cheap to produce these days that they will never stop haunting us, always being re-enforced with pages, and people waving pages, and maybe some people burning pages. The idea is the new logo as I have stated. It’s cool to have some ideas, but they must be the right ones: who would be caught dead sporting monothelitism? That is so A.D 662. Either keep up with the trends in thought or do something useful. Like going to sleep. Or write something that is completely hypocritical.
Thinking is stupid.
