psychology dector

On the very first page of Islands of Books (1951), Lawrence Clark Powell sets up his thesis: “There is a power in certain books to evoke the time and the place of their first reading, when by merely giving a glimpse of their backs they take us backwards to that time of discovery which now seems magically inevitable.” He is speaking here of staring at his book shelves and reading the spines of the books therein, and this acts as a fuse to light up his memory. In this cloth-bound, old book, Powell celebrates reading. He talks about his bicycle trips to the library and filling his bag with books he hasn’t read, and then pedaling home to spend the evening in bed with his finds, eating chocolate and satiating his boundless appetite for the written word. Heaven. He also writes of his library writer’s room as an adult, nine feet by nine feet, lined with books, the voices that comfort and inform him on his journey through life. This is a delightful book about books and the power of reading t

I could not help thinking about H.L. Mencken this past weekend while listening to the boobs and dunces on cable news proclaiming the end of the world . No doubt that is what he would have called them: boobs and dunces. Mencken was a journalist and cultural critic from Baltimore, and he never tired of finding innovative ways to denigrate the idiocy displayed by Americans. This weekend, I dipped into the middle volume of his three book autobiography, Newspaper Days 1899-1906 , and came out the other side adding him to my list of influential writers I feel I know but have never met. My first encounter with Mencken’s voice was through the character of Hornbeck, the cynical reporter in the play , Inherit The Wind , who was modeled after the distinguished newspaper man. From that moment on, I have been a dedicated reader of his work. However, this was my first foray into his autobiography. I found his writing here infinitely readable, although the times and people of which he writes are l

The quiet, old, musty-smelling, echoes of history. The library has survived fires, earthquakes, floods. This makes it biblical, mythological, the field of Elysium for the mind life. I have come to this library in late spring to read, to write, to consider where my life is going. All the students have left, and I am alone with my thoughts, and the thoughts of those lining the shelves. Mute testimonies from another age. I hear the voices calling me . I walk between the stacks, selecting random volumes: 1909, 1921, 1894, 1910. The spines are creased and lined, the type worn away. I open the books and find some have not been checked out since the 1950s. There they sit, waiting patiently for someone to come along and bring them to life again by reading. The library is a four-story affair built on the side of a hill. You enter on the third floor. Spanish colonial architecture, all arches and vaulted ceilings. This is the reading area, now filled with computer stations. Above is a sort of ba

Remember when we lamented the demise of the independent bookstore? We swore the chains were conspiring to push them under. Barnes and Noble and Borders were the evil empires, crushing the poor mom and pop stores into oblivion. Now we all gather to mourn the passing of the chains. In my neighborhood, almost all the Barnes and Nobles and the Borders locations are gone. I went from having the independents like Dutton’s —four locations in Los Angeles—and the chains—one Borders and two Barnes and Nobles within a five mile radius—to just one Barnes and Noble. Bookstores in Los Angeles are disappearing faster than spring flowers in Death Valley. To add insult to injury, I drove by the most recently closed Borders location only to see it had already been etched with graffiti. Worse, one tagger’s pen name is “Thinnk.” That’s right: with two letter Ns. Inside the shuttered bookstore with the shelves standing empty and forlorn, all the lights were on. In broad daylight!! I guess for the ghost rea