Strong Verbs Are Just Better

There is nothing new in this link between loving books and conspicuously consuming them. There is a long, classed history of book consumption as social posturing. As American culture scholar Lisa Nakamura points out, displaying books for others to view has long been “a form of public consumption that produces and publicizes a reading self.” But contemporary bookish culture extends conspicuous consumption beyond books themselves, to a range of lifestyle goods that have, in fact, played a significant role in the recent revival of independent bookstores (and in the expansion of Canadian book retailer Indigo into the U.S.). It is also more complex than a simple display of cultural or institutional capital, rooted as this culture is in a deep emotional investment in books that consumers have been taught to express through consumption. And we can see it playing out through the history of book-buying, from early bibliophilia to the midcentury Book-of-the-Month Club’s offer to help you build a personal library to millennial-aimed blogs that turn bookishness into consumer behavior.

In my research on Arab women, one woman who worked with Muslim women told me something I never forgot: racism is exclusively about power. There are layers. Stories. The human race is multi-dimensional, capable of feeling deeply in one extreme way or another, of experiencing contrast—hate or indifference, fear or love. We are less interested in a way of introspection, or compassion, in allowing for individualism that breeds a more united whole. You get flack for suggesting individualism is worthwhile, because we are tribal and interested in the power that comes with it.

Philip Larkin was once asked in an interview why he chose to live in Hull, ‘so far away from the centre’. The poet responded with a rather more sensible enquiry: ‘The centre of what?’ As Larkin understood, the question of where is central and where remote is not so much a geographical one as it is political: a matter of perspective backed by power. ‘The centre’ is where decisions are made. It is where people and money are concentrated. ‘The centre’ is the voice to which everywhere else must listen.

But Larkin’s question also has artistic implications. Because to write well about a place, to see and to show it as it truly is, it is necessary to rid oneself of the illusion of ‘remoteness’. Cliches must be cast aside, distance dissolved. The peripheral must become central.

Thursday March 21 is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. You may not have heard of the day before. It is commemorated in Australia as Harmony Day.

Harmony Day was a creation of the Howard Government twenty years ago, a response to research conducted for the federal government about the causes of racism. It was a deliberate choice to not focus on ‘anti-racism’ but rather emphasise the importance and value of ‘harmony’.

Indeed, in report after report, early modern travellers to Sweden wrote home about the undress they had witnessed in the saunas. For instance, the Italian naturalist and diplomat Lorenzo Magalotti included a scene from a sauna when illustrating his narrative of his visit to Stockholm in 1674. In Magalotti’s sketch, a fully unclothed man rests on a bench at the back of the sauna while in the foreground, two female attendants wearing linen garments tend to the bathers.

With accounts and illustrations like Magalotti’s, early modern travellers to Sweden voiced both fascination and a moral distancing from the local custom. In this way, the sauna provided travellers to Sweden with the curious and strange that was expected in an early modern travel narrative about foreign lands. At the same time, the sauna created an actual and conceptual space where the traveller could both join in with and comment on the local variability of eroticism.

I eventually ran out of the one makeup item I still sometimes wore, red lipstick, and now found myself incapable of making the trip to Sephora to buy more. ( A month later, kneeling and sobbing before my Marie Kondo discard pile, it felt silly ... this book had finally done it. )