I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

It’s the way this builds, the words tumbling against each other in their eagerness to be heard, swelling off the page, yearning to get to you. As if in their urgency they forget that they’re symbols for a thing and in forgetting become the thing, three-dimensional and real and emphatically present.

I found this breathtaking, in the most literal way possible. I hope I manage to write a paragraph half as good one day.

I didn’t expect to feel this way. I’ve spent the past couple of years railing against Apple’s increasingly closed ecosystem and calling Jobs a dangerous utopianist. At one point I fled Apple products entirely (and then, rather quickly, came crawling back). My infatuation with the man never waned, but I sort of convinced myself that the admiration at its root had long since died on the vine.

I was wrong. It came rushing back last night, wreathed now in an unfamiliar nimbus of loss.

Which is weird. I don’t have any real connection to Jobs — except, of course, through the beautiful things he made. I remember when I first laid eyes on the Titanium Powerbook, sitting on its pedestal, sleek and compact and absolutely gorgeous. My emotional response to that piece of machinery didn’t make any sense, but the same thing happened over and over again for a decade: the iPod Nano, the iPhone 4, the Macbook Air.

That can’t be why Jobs turned out to be so important to me, though. There has to be more to it than stuff.

And it’s not his wild success, either, or his unlikely second act, or his wealth. It’s certainly not the sloganized ideals that Apple claims to represent. You can admire those things, but you can’t love them.

No, I think it’s this: Jobs embodied everything I want to be. Driven and brilliant and passionate, independent and confident and unbowed by dogma. Utterly consumed by what he believed in, and relentless in its pursuit.

He was a sort of living monument to the notion that you have to care deeply about what you do, and that there’s nothing better or more satisfying than making beautiful things. That anything done passionately, and well, is art.

Jobs was that rarest of things: a man wrapped around an idea. The man’s gone now, but he left the idea behind, and the best way to honor his memory is to live it.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instructors in college gently and not-so-gently tried to tell me I had no talent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield.

I had a couple of really amazing teachers in high school too, and they made that four-year slough of despond not just bearable but occasionally even fun — and, in retrospect, kind of inspiring. I’m thinking about Mrs Page, whose AP English class injected Faulkner into my life; Mr Hood, who didn’t teach history so much as perform it, bring it bodily into that cheerless antiseptic classroom; Mr Lewis, a part-time actor who injected thespian flare into everything he did.

And most of all Mr Swift, who taught creative writing and ran the literary magazine and is, second only to my dad, a lot of the reason I’m still writing today.

Sadly, I don’t have a whole lot of specific memories of my time with Mr Swift — my brain is sort of an anti-sponge that way. But I do remember his bemused half-smile, and the way he delivered criticism — gently, in a way calculated to instruct rather than sting — and, most of all, his careful treatment of the overheated, “experimental” love story I submitted to the literary magazine in my junior year.

It was called Ladyfair, and it was garbage, bad enough to remain reliably mortifying a quarter century later. I remember handing it in to him, and waiting for his reaction — and not getting one. He just let it pass: without praise, thank god, but also without the scorn it so richly deserved. I can only guess at his motives, but I really think he was being careful not to bury my enthusiasm under the loam of it’s early mistakes. He thought there might be better things coming, and was wise (and kind) enough to nurture the good and ignore the awful.

We’re all clay when we’re young, and even people who aren’t responsible for molding us can screw us up pretty easily. When someone like Mr Swift, this guy who we weren’t related to, who we couldn’t really do anything for, who wasn’t contractually required to do anything more than yammer at us for 45 minutes every day and grade our papers and then move on to the next batch of disaffected wastrels — when people like that don’t just not fuck you up, but actually bend over backwards to help you become better than you otherwise would have been — I mean, I don’t believe in miracles, but I think that’s kind of miraculous.

It’s sad that we live in era that’s turning steadily against its teachers. Many states are mandating lockstop curricula geared less toward educating (much less inspiring) than they are toward getting you through standardized tests. Eggars, again:

I don’t remember Mr. Criche teaching us how to take standardized tests, but when we took them, we did well. I don’t remember Mr. Criche gearing his lesson plans toward any state-regulated curricula, but we did pretty well on any and every scale. Why? Because he made us curious. He was curious, so we were curious. He was hungry for learning, so we were hungry, too. He made us want to impress him with the contents of our brains. He taught us how to think and why.

Teachers are getting laid off¹ in staggering numbers these days, and the ones who aren’t are enduring assaults on their already meager salaries and benefits. This is, in a word, insane. Even if the profession wasn’t filled with people who routinely go over and above the call of duty, it would still be one kazillion times more useful to society than the smug billionares who sit atop the income pyramid, busily trading and grifting and greasing palms and adding nothing to anyone’s lives except their own.

But education is filled with those kind of people. Matt Damon made this point, forcefully, at the SOS Teachers March in July:

A teacher wants to teach. I mean, why else would you take a shitty salary, and really long hours, and do that job, unless you really loved to do it?

Look, there’s no need to scour the world for weeping statues or messiah-shaped coffee stains or sane Tea Party candidates: there’s a miracle happening every day in every school in every state in the country. We take that for granted — I certainly did — but it’s a gift that we appear to be busily destroying.

My new story, The Diner on the Edge of Hell, is out in the latest issue of Weird Tales. Happiness!

Here’s an excerpt:

Petrie shrugged and sat back, chewing placidly, and looked around the diner. It was a spotless, perfect stereotype of a diner: bright porcelain tiles, harsh fluorescent lights, a juke box, a pinball machine. A line of pennants hung just below the ceiling, points-down, like a colorful array of stalactites. Booths lined three of the walls in a sort of squared-off U, capped by the long formica bar at the back of the diner. A demon in a kilt stood behind the bar, wiping down its glossy surface. His name was Harold.

“Hey,” called Petrie, and pointed at his empty mug. Harold glanced up, with two of his eyes, and nodded.

There was a flash of color on the other side of the window, and a rift opened up in the molten sky. Janikowski leaned toward the window and watched something pour out of the rift — a long columnar thump of something, like a narrow waterfall — and explode into a roiling particulate cloud when it touched the ground. He squinted through the muck until the cloud resolved itself a swarm of creatures, tiny with distance, making its way toward the diner.

“I thought we were waiting for a girl,” said Petrie.

“We are.”

“Then why am I looking at a horde of demons?” There was a tightness in Petrie’s voice that some people might have mistaken for fear.

Janikowski stood up. “I don’t know.”

“This is a setup.”

“Maybe.” He took a step toward the door, looked back. “You coming?”

“Hell yes I’m coming.” Petrie ducked under the table and came up with his cannon. It was long and smooth and tubular and taller than he was, made out of some kind of milk-white metal, with a muzzle the size of a rabbit hole and some sort of fiendishly complicated mechanism on the butt end. “This is finally getting interesting.”

That’s the essence of reader response theory. There is no inherent meaning in a text. It’s what the reader makes of it, and authorial intention is irrelevant. Does that bother you?

Yeah, it bothers me to the extent that the whole universe is like that, the fact that there is a lack of inherent meaning to almost anything. So for me to get pissed off that my lyrics are subjected to that as well is only as productive as getting pissed off at the whole absurd universe. Which happens to be our number one theme.

I’ve always loved bookstores: I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in them, ever since I was a very small person. The first one I remember was called Four Steps Down, on Hamra street, in Beirut. I remember it with startling clarity: the eponymous four steps down to the glass storefront, the beautiful rows of Tin Tin near the door, the colorful piles of books on their display stands, and — farther back, in the darker, quieter reaches of the store — the shelves: hundreds of volumes with tiny close-spaced text and no pictures, massed to the ceiling. I cared less for this area but still loved to wander through it, for reasons that I didn’t fully understand.

Thirty years later, I still don’t. I’d like to say it was some instinctive respect for the corpus of human knowledge as represented by this temple of the written blah blah blah, but it wasn’t — and isn’t — that at all. It was just the books, as objects. Running my finger across their spines. Picking them up. The heft of them; the way they looked, pressed together in their rows; the smell, both musty and new, rising from the bindings when you cracked them open; the soft whisper of pages fluttering against one another.

I’m typing this in Politics and Prose. Yesterday I hung out in Kramerbooks. I’ll probably stop by my local Borders on the way home. This, for me, is a reliable sort of happiness: the kind that you know where it is, an actual physical, visitable place that’ll consistently deliver the goods.

So it’s with some serious, if conflicted, sadness that I watch the era of the paper book wither away. The eBook industry — and, more generally, the internet — and, more generally than that, the emancipation of data from its physical constraints — is barreling toward the printed page like some oblivious dreadnaught, guns chambered, blithely flattening everything in its path.

As soon as you lay your hands on, say, a Nook — this tiny device into which you can easily fit the contents of every book you own, and then every book you’ve ever read, and much, much more — you can feel the death of the printed page, staring up at you from its tiny, unassuming screen. Once you actually use one of these things, it becomes completely obvious that dead-tree books have run their course. It’s not just the breathtaking, bag-of-holding miracle of having all your reading material stuffed into a device about the size of a grade-school primer — it’s the convenience of having all that stuff at your fingertips, the ease of buying new books, the shelf-space you save, the trees you don’t have to pulp, the instant, searchable, bookmarkable access to every word you’ve ever read. It’s not a fair fight. It’s not even close.

But — the minute I step into a bookstore, all those real and obvious and inarguable advantages evanesce, more or less instantly. My forebrain may be convinced of the superiority of eBooks, but the rest of me — the part that doesn’t respond to reason, that’s guided by the much more powerful edicts of memory and nostalgia and emotion — knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will never be anything as good as a book made of paper. This is the same part of my brain that sends out sharp bolts of pleasure when I turn a corner and come unexpectedly on a whole shelf of, say, Philip K Dick novels, or an omnibus edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or a new printing of The Sound and the Fury. I just don’t get that feeling when I type “Philip K Dick” in a search field at Amazon, and then click bloodlessly through six pages of results.

I realize that this makes me a member of the old guard, and that everything I’m saying isn’t just incomprehensible, but possibly even slightly contemptible, to any whippersnappers who’ve grown up on a steady diet of world wide web, and have never been more than a few iPhone-taps away from getting any information they want, whenever the want it.¹

And really, the emancipation of data from the physical world isn’t an unqualified win. There are consequences, both manifest and obscure, to unleashing the entire corpus of human knowledge on our meat-locked brains. Patton Oswalt writes about one of the more subtle aspects of this, the death of traditional nerdery:

When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was Available Forever.

I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. Ever see action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic Anson Williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the back? Or played Atari’s Adventure, found the secret room, and thought, that’s it? Can we all admit the final battle in Superman II looks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney? And how many people had their cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack eaten by a Walkman?

This is one of the consequences of the end of scarcity. A lot of the satisfaction that geeks squeeze out of the world used to derive from rarity — from the baroque difficulty of, say, obtaining and building an Altair 8800 in 1975. There weren’t many people doing this kind of thing, but, reading any account of that era, you can feel the joy these select few drew from the experience.

But it’s not just geeks — there’s something more satisfying about a hard-won achievement, no matter who you are, and there are consequences to the dissolution of barriers. Our entire economic system, for instance, is predicated on the scarcity of units of capital — whether the scarcity is real (gold coins) or artificial (dollar bills). There are authentic, material advantages to making it hard to get stuff.

I’m not talking about the real world here, though — this is something much mushier and ill-defined: the universe of information. There’s very little data in the world that someone with a computer and an internet connection can’t acquire eventually, and probably immediately. This seems obvious to us now, but really it’s a very new development.

Case in point: pre-internet, computer magazines used to publish games in the form of source code, which my brother and I would painstakingly type into my Atari 800XL. Pages and pages of BASIC rife with incomprehensible PEEKs and POKEs, DATA statements followed by strings of numbers that made no sense to either of us. And if you mistyped just one character in that wilderness of close-spaced text, the program wouldn’t work, and all your hours of monkish transcription would be for naught.

But — you couldn’t go buy these games in stores, and the magazines hadn’t yet started shipping disks. You couldn’t download the source off the internet, because there was no internet. You had two choices: type that shit in, or don’t play the game. It was a drag, and it was frustrating, and it sucked.

Then again, I can barely remember any of the games I’ve downloaded in the past couple of years, and I’m pretty sure I’ve played and then discarded them all in the space of an hour. But I do remember those old Atari BASIC games. Even the ones we couldn’t quite get working. I remember the breathless possibility of them.

Another case in point: there was a writer for Analog — one of these old Atari magazines — whose prose I greatly admired. All these games-you-had-to-type-in had little blurbs describing their “plot”, and the world in which they moved, to give some context to the blocky 8-bit graphics stuttering across the screen. They were generally poorly written throwaway space-fillers, but this guy always managed to make them cool, well-written, and interesting. So I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I loved his stuff.

Let me pause here and explain, for the benefit of my younger readers, what I mean by “letter”. There was once a time, before the end of the Cold War, before email and instant messaging and Facebook statuses, when, if you wanted to write things for other people to read, and they didn’t sit very close to you, you had to send them a letter. This meant writing words on one or more pieces of paper and putting them in an “envelope”, writing an address on the front of the envelope and sticking a “stamp” on it and then walking around until you found a stumpy blue R2-D2-shaped thing called a “mailbox”. You’d open the mouth of the mailbox, and put your envelope inside. And then you’d walk away, placing your faith in an invisible system of conveyance that would, by dint of a bucket-line of human-mediated stages, transport your letter to its destination.²

Amazingly, this worked far more often than it didn’t, but it worked at a ridiculously glacial pace. You can literally upload the entire contents of the library of congress to your blog in the time it took for your letter to get where it was going, and still have enough time to write the first version of Facebook.

Anyway. I was amazed and overjoyed to get an actual response, some time later, via this same creaky paper-based mechanism — thanking me for the compliment, and even writing a couple of sentences about the satisfaction a writer feels when someone unexpectedly says nice things about his work.

I pinned that letter to my corkboard, where it stayed until I left for college. I can’t remember what color socks I’m wearing on any given day, or what I ate for lunch this afternoon, or anything I was doing at work before this long vacation started — but I have an incredibly clear image of that letter, hanging under its red pushpin, in my old room.

I’m not trying to make an argument for the return of scarcity and difficulty and delay here. That genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. And even if you could, I wouldn’t want to — nostalgia-tinged emotional satisfaction aside, I love the fact that I can IM my brother whenever I want to talk to him, no matter where he is. It’s time for us to move beyond physical constraints, with all their limitations, inconveniences, and dangers.

Dangers? Yes. I came across an article in the New Yorker ³ recently, about the Vatican’s efforts to modernize its venerable library. The Vatican Library is an incomprehensibly rare and valuable treasure, a storehouse of human knowledge going back thousands of years, but all its data are trapped inside of books and scrolls and incunabula, one fire or flood or careless archivist away from being lost forever.

The Vatican is embarking on an effort to digitize its entire catalog, bringing its priceless archives to the masses — but, perhaps as important, allowing it to slip its shackles and flee into infospace⁴, where it can be endlessly shared and replicated. Where it can be safe. Ubiquity is a far more effective sentry than any locked and guarded and fireproof vault could ever be.

What this will also do, however, is convert all of these physical documents from storehouses of knowledge into artifacts — still precious, of course, but no longer valuable for their contents as much as for their historical significance. They’ll become monuments to a bygone era, and totems of a time when our knowledge was at the mercy of its terrestrial media.

David Mendelsohn, the article’s author, felt this transition firsthand when he visited the Vatican library and asked to see Procopius’s “Secret History” — a very old document that chronicles the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Justinian’s court, and serves as a counterpoint to the largely laudatory press that Byzantine emperor received in his day. It was literally the only document of its kind.

So it can be an emotional experience to hold in your hand something like Alamanni’s copy of Procopius, which for a thousand years was the only object in the world that prevented a big chunk of history — a fragile but crucial truth — from being lost. I sat quietly with the text, thinking of how many hands it had to pass through to reach the Vatican Library, how overwhelming the odds had been against its survival into the digitized present, with its heady promise of infinite availability in time and space.

Assuming that we manage to make it into the future without blowing ourselves up or killing the planet, we can look forward to a world where everything we know and ever knew is universally available, replicated on a grand and staggering scale. Yes, the weight of all that information could crush us — but that’s a filtering problem, and one that we will presumably solve, eventually.

All of this is great for us, but not so great for physical books. I mean, they’re not going to simply disappear, any more than the British Empire disappeared when its fortunes failed and it had to draw back into its own borders. Novels will eventually be — in many ways, already are — another emanation of the datasphere, one mechanism among millions for breathing the atmosphere of information in which we live. Paper books will likely remain popular among the people who grew up reading them, but over time, as we die out, the medium will slide inexorably into the outskirts of popular culture, preserved in museums and lining the shelves of hipster antiquarians.⁵

Which makes me very sad. Future generations won’t even have the chance to choose between the efficiency and convenience of eBooks and the subtler, less quantifiable pleasures of walking into a bookstore and losing yourself in its stacks — literally, physically surrounded by fiction and philosophy and history and biography and memoir, the thoughts and deeds and dreams of thousands stamped onto squares of pulp and bound together and shelved: row upon tantalizing row of books that you can touch, and take down, and page through, and hold.

Being a writer in a world that features [David Foster] Wallace would be like playing basketball in a world that has Michael Jordan, only none of us even know how to play basketball and we’re all injured toddlers with broken lacrosse equipment.

Well: even though the question (a) gives truth way more credit than it deserves¹, and (b) is, to my mind, slightly ludicrous — like asking about the point of breathing — I’ve never managed to cobble together a good answer. No, it’s totally got a point dude! almost never seems to do the trick.

Thankfully, David Foster Wallace has already addressed this, brilliantly:

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

It’s such a beautiful idea, this notion of fiction as a gateway to empathy. Empathy always seems to be in short supply — and it’s such a terrible resource to lack, since you can trace much of the harm that we do to one another to its absence. You see the phenomenon everywhere, from easy behind-the-back calumny to the casual belligerence of online “discourse” to the Dresden firebombings. Distance — physical, emotional, experiential — helps defeat the simplest tenets of morality and good behavior.

Which is to say: the problem with being skullbound creatures is that we can’t figure out what’s going on inside all the other skulls. What we “know” about other people isn’t just speculative — it’s filtered through a veil of preconception and self-regard that taints and colors everything. If our entire view of the world consists of fleeting glimpses between the battlements, then we’re screwed: it’s not just possible to be cruel, it’s inevitable.

We have more than that, of course. Love and family and religion and civilization are all at least in part attempts to defeat this ugly segregation. But, even with all that, it’s fundamentally impossible to fully transcend our barriers — contra Donne, every man really is an island. What we can do is gather into archipelagos of common purpose, and link hands over the narrow straits that divide us, and give it our best shot.

I used to think that Jesus’ exhortation to love your neighbor as yourself seemed to kind of miss the point — shouldn’t you be preaching a path to love that doesn’t involve narcism? But lately I see the wisdom of this: you have to take your own narrow worldview as a given, and then use it as a template for getting into other people’s heads.

And that’s what fiction gives us: a way to import the lives of strangers into the walled cities of our minds, and experience them as our own. It spurs our imagination. If we can imagine, we can understand. If we can understand, we can empathize.

That’s the point.

Also, girls dig guys who read fiction.

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

The award goes to Molly Ringle, an actual writer who writes actual, non-terrible, novels. Bravo.

Lapsed Cannibal splits his time between working on his perpetual stillness machine and looking for the end of Pi — where, he is given to understand, there are leprechauns. Sometimes he says the word “gastroenterologist” to himself, over and over again, because he very much enjoys the way it sounds. Occasionally he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal abandoned the sex-and-drug-addled life of a professional kazoo player to become a computer programmer, and has never looked back. He has taught himself to travel through time — but only forward through time, at normal speed. Sometimes he writes stories. This is one of them.

Or:

There is presumably some version of Lapsed Cannibal who enjoys alligator wrestling, blindfolded hand gliding, and small-island-nation-conquering, but this is not that version. This version did once put some uncomfortably spicy hot sauce on a taco, which he ate all of, but he doesn’t like to brag. He’s also written some stories about a bumbling wizard and his familiar, an invisible chair named Door. This is one of those stories.

Or:

Lapsed Cannibal recently became Dictator of English, and in that capacity will soon abolish the words “utilize”, “incentivize”, and “productize”, and then unbanish both split infinitives and sentences that end in prepositions (victims of the pitiless hegemony of Dictator Strunkenwhite). He will also introduce a new pronoun, “glubmar”, to fill the gender-neutral gulf between “him” and “her”. As in: “Hmmm, I wonder if glubmar is a boy or a girl?” He realizes that this is an ungainly pronoun, but he is Dictator, and can do what he wants. This is a story he wrote.

I could also write something accurate about myself, but my god that would be boring.

Update: Ok, I’m going to write something accurate and boring. Sigh.