"Shelfari is a Bald-Faced Liar!"

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."

— Stephen King (Different Seasons)

"If you don't have time to read,
you don't have the time (or the tools) to write.
Simple as that."
— Stephen King

Late last November, while rattling around in this 3-storey, circa 1760s house in small-town central France I had the idea that I would like to have a Shelfari.com widget in the sidebar of my blog.

I didn't know Shelfari from Shinola® but I had seen its virtual bookshelf embedded here and there on my travels through Blahglandia and it appealed to me at a visceral level. So, one day I clicked on someone else's pixelated library and launched myself into Shelfari where I set up an account, picked out a bookcase, uploaded it, and got to cogitating on what I was going to put on its shelves.

The principle of Shelfari is simple: one can list books--privately or publicly--that one is reading, has read, or plans to read. After that there are all sorts of other activities one can engage in such as reviewing/rating books, participating in book groups, and/or inviting other people to visit one's own book list. As is always the case in Technolandia, one can always do more than one realistically has time and attention for, if one plans to continue to buckle down and read substantively with any regularity.


Barnes & Noble "Meet the Writers"
Steve Bertrand interview
with writer, Jonathan Franzen

Without missing a beat (Shirley Brice) Heath replied: "Yes, but there's a second kind of reader. There's the social isolate---the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with people around you--because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."

Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading---to reconnect to that community.

According to (Shirley Brice) Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she also calls them "resistant" readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What's perceived as the antisocial nature of "substantive" authors, whether James Joyce's exile or J. D. Salinger's reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that's necessary for inhabiting an imagined world.

Looking me in the eye, Heath said: "You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world." I knew she was using the word "you" in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description's truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.

--How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen

I started to tell you the Shelfari book-title-disgorging story on my 58th birthday:

3 December 2010

I had not planned to blahg today.

I was hoping to be able to go down by the River Creuse and hop on one of the buses that takes people from Le Blanc to the train station in Poitiers (6 euros aller simple) or the train station in Châteauroux (2 euros aller simple). But I had so many blog friends stop by to comment on my most recent blahg posts that a post was generated in spite of my best intentions not to blahg.

Deborah at The Temptation of Words was kind enough to comment and the response that I began to make to her comment got way out of hand. Consequently, I have given it its own place here:

Deborah,

Thank you for your enthusiasm and appreciation for my book title spew! I found another one last night in my memory--Oblivion by Peter Abrahams.

Having followed through on the impulse to post that little Shelfari widget in the sidebar here has paid off in rather unexpected ways and is a perfect example of the value inherent in the admonition by Seth to "Follow your impulses!"

I would probably have been less sensitized to the act of remembering what books I had read had my mother not committed suicide. Oddly enough, the desire to record––in order to recall at a later date––those titles stems from the fact that after my mother's death I was not only furious with her for having killed herself but also for the fact that I could no longer concentrate in order to read because she had killed herself. Merde!

On the one hand, it could sound quite shallow, to be preoccupied by an inability to concentrate enough to read in the aftermath of such an event. On the other, I loved to read. I learned through reading. I taught myself through reading. I looked for answers to big questions through reading. I escaped through reading. Reading is what I did. I was a reader. I did not think of myself as a writer of more than personal journals or letters and greeting cards. I liked to speak, but one does not always have a willing audience for one's monologues. Book writers were my hero/ines.

I discovered after her death that I had taken the/my ability to concentrate totally for granted. Although I had already been alive for 38 years prior to her death, and had my share of distressing experiences in that life, I had never had an experience that made it impossible for me to concentrate enough to read books for as long as it was going to turn out to be. I realized that the ability to concentrate was not a given, but rather a capacity "on loan" that could be taken away at any time by any number of thieves.

Once I realized my ability to concentrate enough to read was gone, I was down for the count and had no idea when it might come back again. I had to wait and see. So, from March 31, 1991 until November 1993, I did not begin, and read to completion, a book. It seems hard to believe that as I count out 32 months on my fingers, but it is accurate. In fact, the first book I read after the shattering of my ability to concentrate by that .22 caliber bullet to the right temple was called Aliocha by Henri Troyat, although you will not find it sitting on Shelfari's shelves. The search for it failed. However, thanks to writing this note to you, I discovered that I had spelled the title incorrectly, and Shelfari is nothing if not literal--if you make a spelling error, you will get a "failed search" message. They should think about smartening up their search engine a little bit!

Having developed the outlook of the type of person who believes that it is the creation, institution, and maintenance, or destruction, of specific habits that determine what the experience of my most intimate life-of-the-mind, and its attendant physical appearance, is going to take, I had the idea that if I could begin, read, and finish one book, and log its title in a specific location, I could build upon that accomplishment and beat my way back into the habit of reading for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. It happened that I was taking a course in how to use Microsoft's ACCESS database software at the time, so I built an rudimentary home for my imagined future list of "Books Read." After that, I was, more or less, home free, if one does not judge too harshly my choice of reading material. One thing that Shelfari does not contain is the reading that I did in college. Unless we now add Huis Clos by Jean-Paul Satre from my Philosophy 101 course and start casting about in that general direction...

The list served me well and came to hold more than 500 titles before I fell out of the habit of entering the latest one. My confidence had grown by then and I didn't feel compelled to log every book. Time went by and I continued to go to the library and/or buy books at my favorite bookstores, used-book stores, or swap meets. We moved and the PC with the ACCESS database got boxed up for a few years. I suppose that I could be called a bibliophile. When I was packing to move to France, the easiest thing to pack was, naturally, all of our books. However, I had to be very careful to have lots of library books lying around the beater trailer or I risked feeling compelled to go out and buy more books!

Blessings and curses... If one can't concentrate to read, one doesn't have too many books piling up around one's bed or sofa. If one can't concentrate deeply when one begins to be able to concentrate again, one risks reading less demanding material. If one has experienced a devastating loss, one wants to know how other people survived similar losses. If one has always harbored an interest in the small, personal memoir, one has a ready-made reason for indulging one's curiosity...

Tuesday, as I was preparing my first blahg post in almost two months, and thinking about that old list of "Books Read" I had the impulse to go ahead and make the effort to set up the old PC that has been sitting, finally unpacked, on a shelf beside my bed since April 2010. I was afraid that I would no longer know how to set it up or retrieve the material contained therein, but I needn't have feared. It all went together without a hitch and I was excited and gratified to realize how much I had remembered on my own without the prompts from the list. I was amazed to find out how many books I had listed over about a 5 year period and also how long it had been since I actually listed anything at all in that database. There were some books that I had no memory of reading and some I genuinely wonder if I read completely, if at all. Did I ever list books that I intended to read and then not read them? I have given myself a mental "exaggeration" margin of error of about 50 books+/-. Who really knows?

What I do know is that I inadvertently stumbled upon a key memory trigger for my unique brain/mind circuitry that has allowed me to access memories of my life in areas that I normally have trouble recalling--especially memories from my adolescence. If I try to go directly to that area of recall, I run into painful feelings, usually of failure or humiliation, but if I come at the memories via the books I was reading, the rooms in which I was reading them, the towns I lived in, the houses, the people who occupied the houses with me, it all comes flooding back--the bitter and the sweet...

It was, and still is, a very good thing that I had a psychological universe of my own, anchored in books, because the blow back from a fatal gunshot wound to the head is guarandamnteed to leave a world of collateral damage in its wake. I'm happy that my younger past self had that life-line with which to drag herself back to some semblance of normalcy and with which to move into some unexpected version of the future...

So, blame this blahg post on Deborah, my inspiration for today!

That birthday post never got published, but I went on dredging my memory for titles and stopped for a few months at 1127 titles. I quit blahging with any regularity or depth because it takes time, a lot of time, and I knew that the time it was taking was time that could otherwise have been spent reading. I was also in a quandary with respect to what kind of writing I wanted to do--I can't blahg about my life in France à la Peter Mayles. It's not possible and the interview with Jonathan Franz embedded above eloquently addresses why. Thus, I am still mulling over what I can blahg about, if anything, with commitment and a modicum of intellectual and emotional satisfaction.

Nevertheless, today I can blahg about the fact that Shelfari is a bald-faced liar! I found that out entirely by accident, however.

During a Tuesday evening apéro last week with my 74 year old Frencher Half and an 84 year old uprooted Parisienne here in Boonville, France, we had occasion to discuss death, dying, dignity, and provisions for self-dispatching if ever push came to shove--inspired by the brouhaha concerning 91 year old direct-mail entrepreneuse and kevorkianette Sharlotte Hydorn. Which conversation unearthed the titles of 3 books I had forgotten that I had read--Final Exit, First You Cry, and Last Wish--all of which concern, among other things, illness and death-with-dignity.

The next day I wanted to enter those newly revealed titles in Shelfari so I logged on and was entering them when I saw something that I had never noticed before--a short sentence stating "You have no books read this year."

"Say WHAT?"

"Me? No books read this year? "

"Then what the hell have I been doing since January 1, 2011 when I was not blahging because I was reading?"

"Shelfari, you are a bald-faced liar!"

"Portrait of My Mother Reading"

by the Pliers
O'Neill's Camp, Alviso, California
circa 1972

"If You Could Read My Mind," 1970
written & performed by Gordon Lightfoot

And, for your information, Liar-Liar-Pants-on-Fire-Shelfari, this year I have read:

• The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen
• I Don't Need A Baby To Be Who I Am by Joan Brady
• Their Wildest Dreams by Peter Abrahams
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 10th Anniversary Edition by Stephen King
• How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
• Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher
• Unwinding the Clock by Bodil Jonsson
• Télérama, the French TV Guide with class
  

Now, I realize that 9 books in 6 months might appear to be a paltry accomplishment to Shelfari, but, in my defense, it must be noted that I also:

• mounted an Ancestry.com public family tree that now contains 5,089 names--each accompanied by recorded documentation, more than 10,000 records--which translates into about 6-8 hours/5 days per week in online research and data-entry chores
• made a trip to the SoCal, USA--January 18 - March 26--to visit friends and continue completing the move to France
• made a trip to NoCal, USA to visit friends
  
• made a trip to Mérida, Yucatán from March 11 - March 22 to visit friends and successfully lug educational supplies down for the newly-minted, unfunded Yucatán State Program for Teaching English to Elementary School Children
• came home exhausted and spent a month recuperating
• translated one of the town's cafés' menues from French to English
• hosted international travelers, from within and without France, for lunch and dinner
• wrote innumerable emails to friends and family, a number of whom have never deigned to respond
• worked on both garden- and house-beautiful projects around our little outpost in la belle France
• and took a great number of photographs of the dove who is now nesting 2 new baby doves for the 2nd time since April outside one of our bedroom windows
  

So, if you find yourself the victim of Shelfari's spreading of false rumors about your reading prowess, just remember this post and take heart.

Now, I have to go find my copy of Psycho-Généalogie: Mode d'Emploi, Comment transformer son héritage psychologique? and get to reading...