Tom Piazza: (still asleep; shifting slightly in bed) Three bucks’s too much . . .
Questioner: Mr. Piazza . . .
TP: (shifts more, frowns, groans)
Q: We’re here to talk about the future of the book.
TP: (waking up) . . . huh?
Q: The future of the book . . . your thoughts . . . ?
TP: What the fuck are you talking about?
Q: Uh . . . we discussed this . . . ? You were going to . . .
TP: What do you mean by “book”? Where are my glasses . . .
Q: We can come back some other time, if this . . .
TP: Here they are. How did my glasses get on the floor? (picks up an envelope from the nightstand, shakes it slightly, plucks out two small pieces of what appears to be rock candy, and places them under his tongue) Okay—which book are you talking about, now?
Q: You were going to give us a few words about the future of the book. For a . . . book.
TP: Right, right. (sits up; opens nightstand drawer; pulls out a .38 pistol) I assume I can define the word “book” any way I want to, since you won’t define it for me?
Q: (alarmed, staring at gun) Yes, certainly . . .
TP: Okay. (significantly more alert) I’ll skip all the usual drainage about electronic books and the death of publishing and how many cookbooks get published and how hard it is to sell midlist fiction. And how important literature is, and how we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives, or how in the future we’ll all be able to write our own endings to books, as if we can’t do that already, or whether backlit screens will replace regular LCDs on the new Zorro e-reader . . . You don’t need me for that crap. I really don’t care anyway. I’m old school.
Q: (still staring at the .38) Meaning . . . ?
TP: Meaning first of all that I like books that I can hold in my hand. Made of paper. I don’t need to plug them in, and I don’t have to buy batteries for them. They look different from each other, and I like that. I like looking at Bleak House and being able to tell that it embodies a different sense of life than Jesus’ Son does. I like carrying the fuckers around with me. One weighs more than the other. If you like to read your books on an Etch A Sketch, that’s fine with me. Especially if you’re reading my books. But it’s like looking at a book of paintings where Guernica is the same size as a Holbein portrait. You get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist’s ambition.
Q: Isn’t ambition a little . . . corny?
TP: (raises .38; cocks hammer) I’m sorry; would you care to repeat that?
Q: I said, “Ambition makes me horny.”
TP: (lowering .38) Yeah, me too. I want to talk about novels right now, because that’s what I write.
Q: You’re also writing for TV, aren’t you?
TP: (angrily; defensively) Yeah—so what? Besides, it’s not TV; it’s HBO . . .
Q: (holding up hands) Nothing wrong with that. Just checking.
TP: Computers and e-books and smartphones all basically look alike. They are strictly vehicles; you pick them up to step through them into some consensus reality; you’re wired in. Everything is leveled out. When everything has equal weight, everything is weightless. The world they offer is one of infinitely diverse information with a common denominator: the screen. The computer is neutral in that it gives you access to limitless amounts of information, but the one requirement is that you have to get it on the computer. The information has no smell, no weight, no texture. Nothing that seriously impinges on your reality. People think it represents some kind of democratizing of information because everything’s the same size. But democracy is when things of different sizes get a chance to mix it up and work it out, measure themselves in their respective strengths. If everything is the same size, there’s no perspective. Perspective, as in, you know, painting. Everything becomes twodimensional, flat . . .
Q: Isn’t perspective an illusion? A person’s face looming close to the viewer might appear larger than a skyscraper in the distance . . .
TP: Exactly. But that tells you something about reality. Whereas if you had a little chart where you could see everything rendered in exact relative scale but boiled down to a fifteen-inch frame, it might tell you something factual, but you wouldn’t have an experience. You wouldn’t learn something about the reality that something small near at hand can have a much larger impact than something large far away . . .
Q: Well . . . whatever. So what about the novel?
TP: I’m coming to that. A novel makes a world from one writer’s perspective. It offers point of view, in the specialized literary sense, which is to say that it places point of view in a contrasting context. The writer makes the point of view, maybe multiple points of view, and also makes the context for those points of view. You make a world. A computer is a competing kind of world; it’s an anti-world. The computer’s ambition is to transcend point of view entirely.
Q: (gaining confidence) But what about all the chat rooms and discussion boards and social networking sites? There are a lot of points of view offered there.
TP: There are a lot of points of view being offered right now down in a dozen bars outside on Airline Highway, but very little perspective. Their dynamic is about letting off steam. If you want to cook something you have to keep the oven closed for a while, otherwise it will be half-baked. Nobody really works anything out at the corner bar. They just confirm their own assumptions. They think they have a point of view because they’re arguing with somebody. But perspective means arguing with yourself. Two eyes, set in different locations on your face, make 3-D. Thelonious Monk used to say, “Two is one.” That’s what he meant.
Q: I’m having trouble following you.
TP: Yeah . . . right . . . well, I guess it boils down to some people like books and some people don’t.
Q: But you’re making a case for one over the other.
TP: I’m not, really. I’m just saying they’re different.
Q: I mean, why is that important? Why is it important whether you get your information from a computer of some sort or from a physical book?
TP: (regarding the questioner appraisingly) The information is qualitatively different, isn’t it? Isn’t there some sort of metainformation in the weight of a book, in the effort and time it takes to produce it, as opposed to just hitting a button and sending your latest notion off into the internet? There’s a resonance. Somebody else might have held the book, and valued it. Maybe they made notes in the margin, and kept it and handed it down to their children . . . I mean, you can give somebody a book; it has weight, it’s a gesture of faith in the future. The message of the internet is that the moment is what matters; the closer you can get to that virtual moment, the closer you are to reality. But a novel offers perspective; it says time curves and things change, and what looks big now might really be small, and vice-versa, and here’s a model of how that works . . . I mean, if there’s no future for books, there’s no future . . . People who are interested in time and have a taste for the individual consciousness up against mass consensus will always have a taste for books.
Q: So that’s your prediction about the future of books?
TP: (annoyed) Look, I don’t know about the fucking future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in ten seconds.
Q: (exasperated) Oh, that is ridiculous; everybody is obsessed with it. There are tens of thousands of websites dedicated to making guesses about the future . . . (gasping) Dear God . . . what are you doing?
TP: (points the .38 at the questioner and tightens his index finger on the trigger) I’ve just about had it with this conversation.
Q: Please . . . don’t shoot.
TP: (pulls trigger; flame sprouts from the tip of the gun. It is a gagstore cigarette lighter)
Q: (shaking, wiping forehead with a kerchief) Jesus . . . what is wrong with you?
TP: Oh, come on. You saw that coming, didn’t you?