James Hynes

I love the History Channel. It's not just my default viewing choice, the place I always end up when there's nothing particular on that I want to watch, but it's often my destination as well. Some of my faves redound to my credit—The Universe and the superb How the Earth Was Made—and some of them don't—UFO Hunters, Life After People—but suffice it to say the channel no longer deserves its old derisive nickname, the Hitler Channel. It also has a (sort of deserved) reputation as a politically conservative channel, and god knows, there are a lot of red-meat, guy-centric shows like Patton 360 or those 300-ish recreations of ancient battles or the Saturday afternnoon marathons of Band of Brothers. But there are also less chest-thumping shows like America Eats, where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know about potato chips, and The History of Sex, where you can hear that old leftie Peter Coyote narrate a lot of high-toned soft-core, complete with lubricious old Japanese paintings and racy carvings from Southeast Asia. So, in the interest of trying to nail down exactly what the History Channel is all about, I have compiled a rough list of the life lessons I've learned from my couch, often in the wee hours of the morning:

1. We're All Doomed

The History Channel is your one-stop shop for apocalypse porn. Mega Disasters features everything from coastal cities being wiped out by tsunamis to the instigation of a new ice age by supervolcanos to all of life on Earth being exterminated by a gamma ray burst, while the channel's various Nostradamus, Bible code, Mayan doomsday calendar, and Book of Revelation shows feature more or less the same, hyperkinetically edited clips of imminent social collapse and (I think) the same breathless narrator. All these disasters don't necessarily jibe with each other, but I think it's safe to say that a) it's a miracle we're here at all, and b) we all better have our affairs in order by December 21, 2012. Given the human propensity to universalize one's own particular situation—in this case, my 53-year-old guy's propensity to read the imminent collapse of civilization in my own fear of mortality—how could I not love this stuff?

2. Nothing We've Ever Made Will Survive Us

Or, everything rots. This I know from my latest guilty History Channel pleasure, Life After People, which presents more or less accurate science (as far as I can tell) based on a millenarian premise, to wit, that every human being on the planet is raptured at the same instant, leaving our pets, houses, and skyscrapers to fend for themselves against the wrath of Gaia. Or something like that. This show has a rather pornlike aspect as well, since no matter what the putative subject is, every episode is pretty much the same every week—the slow decay of a particular city followed at intervals of a day, a week, a year, a thousand years, etc.—and it always ends with the more or less the same money shot of a skyscraper—the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Space Needle in Seattle, those giant twin towers in Kuala Lumpur—crumbling slowly to the ground in all its pornographic CGI glory. Along the way, every other human accomplishment that I care about—mainly books and movies and music—will have crumbled to dust centuries before. But then, there'll be nobody left to read or watch or hear them except the feral descendants of my cats, so what difference does it make? Why get out of bed in the morning? I ask you.

3. People Will Believe Anything...

...no matter how little evidence there is. See #1 above, especially the Nostradamus, et al., programming. I'd bemoan the fact that How the Earth Was Made shares the same cable address as UFO Hunters, and wonder just what conceiveable demographic could possibly encompass people who watch both, if it weren't for the fact that I am that demographic. Le UFO Hunters, c'est moi. I still get a thrill out of this stuff, even as Rational, former Science Nerd Jim is screaming at the screen, "It's a fake, for chrissakes! That video doesn't prove anything!" I can only say in my defense that I get a deeper, more satisfying thrill from learning (from How the Earth Was Made) that the hills on the western shore of Loch Ness were once part of the Adirondacks. Or maybe I'm just getting the thrill off of the name "Loch Ness." Who knows?

4. Plumbing Is Civilization

There's a fair amount of snobbery involved in dismissing the History Channel, especially since it doesn't traffic (usually) in the sort of gender-race-and-class social history that is the staple of academic history these days. But I think lefties should cut them a little slack, because it's one of the few places that gives due credit to both engineering and the practical knowledge of working class people. I'm not talking about Ice Road Truckers or Ax Men, necessarily, but rather Modern Marvels, which, if I flip past, I'm immediately stuck to like a fly to fly paper. Watch a few of these, like the ones about the history of pavement, or about dredgers, or about making sausage, or about distilling, and you realize what the real basis of civilization is. Suddenly Life After People makes a lot more sense. Say, just for instance, that not everybody vanishes all at once, but only the novelists and filmmakers and musicians. Guys and gals like me, in other words. Life would be a lot less colorful and interesting, but everything would still work, and the Space Needle wouldn't fall down in a thousand years. But say it's the plumbers and electricians and civil engineers who are raptured (which is, let's face it, a lot more likely than the other way around), leaving just guys like me who can't do anything more technical than change a lightbulb. In that case, basically, let's face it, we're all fucked. Civilization would be over. We all could get by without midlist novelists, but we'd all die without plumbers. Hence, plumbing is civilization. QED.

5. Deep Down, We're All the Same

It turns out ice road truckers and lumberjacks are every bit as backbiting, manipulative, judgmental, and just plain bitchy as New Jersy housewives. Who knew?

6. The World Is a Complex, Strange, and Wonderful Place

Yes it is, in spite of all of the above. We're not in it for long, we're not very nice to each other when we're here, and none of anything we do will probably amount to much (is my midlife crisis showing?), but watch a few episodes of The Universe or How the Earth Was Made and you can't help but marvel at the sheer, strange beauty of the world we live in. I was joking above about the quality of the thrill I get from UFO Hunters versus the pleasure I get from How the Earth Was Made, but it's true: UFO Hunters is fun, but laughably credulous, whereas the History Channel's genuine science programming can really pry your mind open, in a good way. Or at least it will until the Mayan calendar runs out in 2012, and the gamma ray burst cooks the planet like a microwaved baked potato.

Very sad news from Ann Arbor today: Shaman Drum Bookshop, one of the great bookstores in North America, is shutting down for good on June 30. I've written earlier about Shaman Drum's troubles, which are the result of the usual suspects—the Internet, the chains, the economy, you name it—but even though I knew this was possibility, it's still very sad. You can read the message from owner Karl Pohrt about the store's closing here, and there's an article from the Ann Arbor News (which is also shutting down) here.

Rather than rehash the store's recent difficulties, I'll only say that it was my favorite place to give a reading, and not only because Ann Arbor is more or less my home town and the readings were attended by my friends. The store was one of the best venues in the nation for all sorts of great writers, which made it one the most prized destinations on any book tour. You'd always get a great introduction and an attentive and engaged audience. Each reading took over one half of the shop, and it was a wonderfully relaxed and intimate setting in which to read (beautifully designed, I have to add, by my friend, the architect Margaret Wong).

The Drum has been, for almost the last 30 years, one of the vital centers of literary culture in the Midwest, and not only because it went out of its way to carry small press and scholarly titles. The staff were like the Jesuits or the Marine Corps of booksellers, passionate about books and just that much better than other booksellers. My friend, the poet Keith Taylor, was manager there for many years, and, back when he was still smoking, he came to be known as the Mayor of State Street for the little literary/gossip/networking confabs that would happen out in front of the store—Keith knows everybody in the Midwest who ever put pen to paper—whenever he stepped outside for a cigarette and one writer or another would stop to talk with him. I was standing with him one sunny day in the early 90s when the writer Charles Baxter came steaming angrily up to us and said, without a word of greeting, "Borders just got sold to fucking K-Mart." Keith, I think, already knew (he always knows everything first), but it was the first I'd heard of it, and looking back on that moment now, all three of us should probably have felt the chill of the zeitgeist stepping on Shaman Drum's grave.

I was looking forward to reading from Next there next year, especially since so much of my new novel takes place in Ann Arbor. Now that's not going to happen. It's sad, sad, sad. I don't know what else to say.

My new novel, Next, is coming out nine months from tomorrow. I can't really say anything about it, or show  any of it, but here's the cover.

Well, I'm back. My day job has been pretty intense since January, but that's behind me now, and I've got a little more time for useless, unremunerative pursuits such as blogging. Of course, I haven't got a single goddamn thing to say, but (as I understand the rules) that's not actually a handicap in the blogosphere. In fact, I gather that it's an actual job requirement. (If you need proof, just read my previous posts.)

So, in the interest of filling some cyberspace, and reminding anybody who actually reads this thing (Hi, Mom!) that I still exist, I will append a list of the books I read last year. Inspired by my friend Keith Taylor, who's been doing it for years, I've been keeping an annual list for about ten years, and this morning, as I cleaned five months of accumulated papers and dust bunnies off my desk, I came across my list for 2008.

I attach it without comment, except to say, please don't give me a hard time for having read only 36 books last year. I'm a slow reader, and there's a lot of good stuff on TV.  Also, number 2, the Brian Green book, is about string theory, and it's beautifully written and almost completely incomprehensible, so it took me a really long time to read. Oh, and a few of the books are by friends or former students, and I read them in manuscript, meaning you can't find them on Amazon just yet.

1. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
2. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
3. Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
4. The Tailor-King, Anthony Arthur
5. The Weight of Numbers, Simon Ings
6. Death of a Murderer, Rupert Thomson
7. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan
8. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Susan Jacoby
9. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. Darkmans, Nicola Barker
11. Stoner, John Williams
12. Miles Gloriosus, Plautus
13. Roman Britain: Outpost of Empire, H. H. Scullard
14. The Origins of Britain, Lloyd and Jennifer Laing
15. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, Ronald Hutton
16. The Heart of the West, O. Henry
17. The Excellent Empire: The Fall of Rome, Jaroslav Pelikan
18. Philly’s Best, Tom McAllister
19. The Magician’s Book, Laura Miller
20. The Good Thief, Jane Thurmond
21. Antigone, Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles
22. Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, Robert Stone
23. Devi, John Marks
24. Oedipus the King, Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles
25. Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles, translated by Robert Fagles
26. Women of Trachis, Sophocles, translated by David Raeburn
27. The Agricola and The Germania, Tacitus, translated by H. Mattingly
28. Ajax, Sophocles, translated by David Raeburn
29. Nation, Terry Pratchett
30. Theogony, Works and Days, Hesiod, translated by M. L. West
31. The Works and Days, Theogony, The Shield of Herakles, Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore
32. The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952, Charles M. Schulz
33. Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan
34. Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis
35. Life Class, Pat Barker
36. The Complete Peanuts 1952-1954, Charles M. Schulz

J. G. Ballard
1930—2009

This time he found himself, as Osborne had predicted, unable to leave the blocks.

Somewhere in the shifting center of the maze, he sat with his back against one of the concrete flanks, his eyes raised to the sun. Around him the lines of cubes formed the horizons of his world. At times they would appear to advance toward him, looming over him like cliffs, the intervals between them narrowing so that they were little more than an arm's length apart, a labyrinth of narrow corridors running between them. Then they would recede from him, separating from each other like points in an expanding universe, until the nearest line formed an intermittent palisade along the horizon.

Time had become quantal. For hours it would be noon, the shadows contained within the motionless bulk of the blocks, the heat reverberating off the concrete floor. Abruptly he would find it was early afternoon or evening, the shadows everywhere like pointing fingers.

"Good-bye, Eniwetok," he murmured.

Somewhere there was a flicker of light, as if one of the blocks, like a counter on an abacus, had been plucked away.

"Good-bye, Los Alamos." Again a block seemed to vanish. The corridors around him remained intact, but somewhere, Traven was convinced, in the matrix superimposed on his mind, a small interval of neutral space had been punched.

Good-bye, Hiroshima.

Good-bye, Alamogordo.

Good-bye, Moscow, London, Paris, New York . . .

Shuttles flickered, a ripple of integers. Traven stopped, accepting the futility of this megathlon farewell. Such a leave-taking required him to fix his signature on every one of the particles in the universe.

—"The Terminal Beach," 1964

Here's another succinct summary of the Crisis in Publishing, this one from the London Review of Books, by Colin Robinson, a Brit who lost his job at New York publisher in last December's Black Wednesday. Some of it is particular to the publishing world in Britain, but there's a lot about American publishing, including a very lucid explanation of the medieval system of returns, by which publishers have agreed since the 1930s to take back unsold copies from booksellers at full price. Also some prescriptions about What Should Be Done, about which I will have more to say later, when I have the time.

Just this morning, driving down the Drag in Austin, I saw that Intellectual Property, the one remaining general interest bookstore within walking distance of the University of Texas, is closing. Turns out their last day is March 15, and right now they're selling off their complete stock at 50% off. It's not quite an independent—it's owned by Follett's, the textbook store chain—and it's not quite the loss that the closing of Shaman Drum would be, but it's another sign of doom for the old way of selling books.

When I first moved to Austin in the mid-90s, there were at least two general interest bookshops with a scholarly bent across the street from UT. One was called Europa and I was only in it once before it went out of business, and the other was the trade book department of the University Co-op, which was, as I recall, really first rate. Somewhere along the way the the Co-op decided not to sell trade books anymore, which was a real shame, and they sold or leased half of their space to Barnes and Noble, which ran a store there for a few years before it, too, went out of business. A number of professors and other folks at UT lobbied the university to help underwrite a bookstore along the Drag, and Intellectual Property was the result of a deal between UT and Follett's.

It was a pretty good store, if not a great one. For one thing, their shelving was ambitious but idiosyncratic: they had, for example, a classical studies section and a section, clear across the store, for Greek and Roman history, so that if you were looking for, say, a translation of Livy, you had to be sure to check both places. For another thing (he said shamelessly), they never stocked any of my books, despite my asking them to, twice.

But even so, it's a shame to see it go. Perhaps the Co-op will go back into the trade book business, but I doubt it. They seem perfectly content to sell Longhorn paraphernalia, electronics, and textbooks.

An Addendum, 3/1/09: In today's Austin American-Statesman, the paper's excellent books editor, Jeff Salamon, has a comprehensive history of Intellectual Property and a very shrewd and knowledgeable take on why it failed. Check it out.

It seems like most of my recent posts have had to do with yet another cataclysmic, epoch-ending moment in the world of books and literature—books themselves evanescing into pixels, John Updike evanescing into who-knows-what?—so maybe I should write about something else—another post about Bigfoot and UFOs, perhaps? King Zor, anyone?

But instead I thought I'd note yet another crisis in the book business, one that might seem rather localized and particular to one community, but which clearly speaks volumes about everything that's changing in the literary world. I've been lucky to live in three cities with a robust literary culture (i.e., places with lots of writers and writer wannabees in them) and lots of great bookstores. One is the place I live now, Austin, Texas; another is Iowa City, Iowa, where I went to the Writers' Workshop, and where you can't throw a stick down Iowa Avenue without hitting a novelist, a short story writer, or a poet. But the main one, the one closest to my heart, the place I still think of as my hometown, even though I wasn't born there, didn't get there until I was 18, and haven't lived there for nearly 15 years, is Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I won't go into my long history with books and bookshops in Ann Arbor—that would take a book in itself, and who reads books anymore, let alone books about books and bookselling?—but suffice it to say, I've a long, rather intimate history with two Ann Arbor literary institutions. One is Borders Books, which I first knew as a funky independent bookshop with creaking wooden floors during my freshman year at the University of Michigan, and where I went to work, the day after I graduated from college in 1977, back when the store was still a great independent. Lots more to say about my life at Borders, what it has turned into since, and what might become of it, but some other time.

The other great institution was, and still is, for now, Shaman Drum Bookstore on State Street, one of the great literary and scholarly bookshops in North America, founded and run by one of the great American booksellers, Karl Pohrt. There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when I had come back to Ann Arbor after my time in Iowa to teach at Michigan, that I used to drop into the store nearly every day. One of my best friends in the world, the poet Keith Taylor, used to be the manager there. When the store expanded during the 90s, the new space was designed by another good friend, the Ann Arbor architect Margaret Wong. And the store was, and, for now, still is, one of the most author-friendly places to give a reading that I know of; the best readings I've ever had were before a Shaman Drum audience.

Anyway, right now, the store is on the ropes, and is not likely to survive. Rather than explain the situation myself, I'll direct you to this eloquent and heartbreaking open letter from Karl Pohrt himself.

I don't quite know what to say about all this, or even what to think. As I said in a couple of posts ago, the new world of the book and of literature is actually kind of thrilling, and there's a lot I find appealing about, say, the utopian project of making the entire corpus of human knowledge available, free, to everybody, everywhere. But, as Karl points out in his letter, in every major cultural and economic shift, there is collateral damage, and for every cool new thing you can do online with or for or about books, it seems that the price is the death of another great local, indepedent, idiosyncratic bookshop like Shaman Drum. It also seems beside the point to wonder if what we're gaining is worth what we're losing, because it seems like the New Way of Doing Things is an unstoppable juggernaut, and what does it matter what grizzled old guys like Karl and Keith and me think?