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In an edited extract from his introduction to The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms, Richard Powers explains why reading is the last refuge from the tyranny of time

Saturday August 14, 2004
The Guardian

We are living in the middle of an epidemic, one of those viruses that we’ve spread everywhere, almost without noticing. Yet we’ve adapted so well, it seems to have been with us for ever. We live in and around it, hardly even feeling its symptoms anymore. Like so many plagues, this one is iatrogenic, medicine-induced. Our cleanest instruments have produced an illness worse than the one they treat, infecting us with the contagion of real time .

In real time, each day’s every transaction is listed on the global exchange. Strangers with whom we are inextricably linked buy and sell futures on everything we do or fail to do. In real time, we are forever losing massive fortunes’ worth of squandered opportunity.

In real time, every second counts. Every minute must be maximised. Since we cannot stop the escaping moments, we have our machines give us the next best thing: two moments, crammed into one. Split screen. Multitasking. Mobile wireless voicemail message forwarding. RSS feeds. Picture-in-a-picture. We need miss nothing. In fact, we can’t.

In real time, every pleasure and pain plays out in public. Our most intimate fears are blogged and annotated with real-time communal comments a thousand times a day, retrievable any time from anywhere, at least for the time being. Everything we put our hand to is collectively evaluated, its Amazon-user stars continuously updated, in real time. We are kept in every loop, current on every development: film of the year, record of the month, personality of the day, scandal of the minute.

Real time guarantees we are always reachable, always up to date, always immersed in the unfolding world image, never alone, never outside the surging current of data intent on moving us ever farther downstream. In real time, we live in two minds, three tenses, and four continents at once, and buy back the bits lost in transit with frequent-flyer miles.

In short, we have grown so good at mastering time that nanoseconds now weigh heavy on our hands. And still, time stays, and we go.

Roberto Calasso: “Is this the prelude to extinction? Only to the superficial observer. For in the meantime all the powers of the cult of the gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading…”

Reading may be the last secretive behaviour that is neither pathological nor prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real. The story strips its reader, holding her in a place time can’t reach. A book’s power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions.

How fast does real time flow? Clearly, one second per second. What is the rate of time of a book? Figuring that is like buying rupees on the black market: name your rate of exchange.

TE Lawrence: “I’m re-reading it with a slow deliberate carelessness.”

How long does a story last? I know a story where a game of cards lasts longer than a life sentence. I know a story where the Hundred Years War wraps itself up before the salad course.

Inside a book, we remember what we were born knowing: time exists not to use but to refuse, not to leverage but to lay waste to.

How long is an elevator ride? That all depends. What will you be reading on the way up?

Proust: “But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again, in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed - had perhaps for long years seemed - to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated.”

We read to escape - if only briefly - the trap of real time, and then to return and recognise - if only briefly - the times we are trapped in. And for an instant, at least, time does not flow but is. You hit that last sentence and look up: Humbert Humbert is in the train seat in front of you. Charles Bovary beside you in the hospital waiting room. La Belle Dame sans Merci checking you out as the doors slide open and you step off at your floor.

© Richard Powers. This is an edited extract from Richard Powers’s introduction to The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators and Waiting Rooms.

1. Spanish cookies. They’re round, have a hole in the middle, and come in chocolate and vanilla. Available in European groceries.

2. In the movie Cronaca di un Amore (1950) by Michelangelo Antonioni, a woman holding a poodle remarks, “We get all sorts of people in our hotel. Filipinos, Indians…they all speak to her” (the dog).

3. “All I’m saying is, we stay local…but we live global. You get a hankering for the blood of a 15-year-old Filipina and she’s here the next day, express air.” - A yuppie vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3.

There’s a comprehensive listing including Tom Waits songs and fiction by Thomas Pynchon, Paul Bowles, Jonathan Franzen etc in Manila Envelope 1, which will be reprinted next year.

The Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(No, sweetie that’s Chuck Palahniuk.)

He’s a wonderful writer, and the books (My Name Is Red, White Castle, Snow) are spectacular, but a whiff of politics will follow this particular prize. Pamuk was tried for treason in his homeland for saying that the Turks committed genocide upon the Armenians. On the day that the prize was announced, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to deny the genocide in Armenia.

But isn’t everything political anyway? Especially prizes.

I think that at 54 he’s a little young. Now that he’s been canonized, everyone will assume he’s on the verge of death.

Oh, and shouldn’t his translators share the prize or at least be acknowledged? I don’t think everyone in the Academy reads Turkish.

I always thought Gregory Rabassa should have a share in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s glory. (What, you all read him in Spanish?)

Interesting story from ex-publisher Jaime. He had a classmate at university named Rodrigo Garcia. One day Rodrigo’s father came to visit, and it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He took his son’s friends to lunch. “He talked a bit about writing, called it a discipline. Many mornings he forced himself to the table, and he got the same pain in the stomach one gets during final exams in high school. It was not always a labor of love. He could not understand why everyone was always looking for “symbolism”—he just wrote about the way he remembered things, no deeper meaning much of the time.”

Rodrigo Garcia now directs for film and television, including episodes of The Sopranos.

The Sopranos IS the great  literature of our times.

Havaianas, Crocs, flip-flops, they’re all the same to me: tsinelas. I would not wear tsinelas outside the house unless they came with an invisible germ-repelling force field—do you know what sort of filth you’re stepping on each time you go out? Sewage bubbling up from underground, toxic sludge, loogies and other disgusting emanations. To say nothing of microorganisms. Tsinelas are for two things: to wear in the shower, and to kill cockroaches.

Tsinelas are the only reliable cockroach-termination weapon. The most advanced insecticides cannot be trusted: they only lead to future generations of ipis immune to bug spray, plus they stink up your house and  probably have terrible side effects on the health of your pets and humans. Would you eat pesticide-laced vegetables (You probably already have)? You think you’ve annihilated the cockroaches, but the repulsive little monsters are only playing dead!

The only way to guarantee that the ipis is dead, extinct, bereft of life, an ex-ipis, is to whack it so hard with a tsinelas that its insides come out. Or to squish it with a tsinelas until it oozes. (And then disinfect your floor.) Remember: cockroaches can survive without their heads, so decapitation is not enough. Bear in mind that they can survive a nuclear holocaust. They must be terminated with extreme prejudice. Now pick up that tsinelas.

He dictates it to a guy from the ATP so it’s most probably edited, but it still sounds like him.

“There was so much traffic as always today in Moscow. I think that 90% of the people do not know where they are driving or the reason. How can this country function like that? There is always traffic. Who is working? It is just like in Italy, the most amazing country apart from Russia. People never work there, they are always eating or fixing their hair. But I guess the most talented people do not need to work and I think that the Italians are the most talented people in the world apart from the Russians…”

The Fed also blogs but is too damn nice.

“The country was on the slide, in the mire, had teetered on the brink of the crater so long no one suffered from vertigo any more. They were a nation as blasé as steeplejacks and as irresponsible as crows. Three hundred years in a Spanish convent and fifty years in Hollywood had not proved an ideal apprenticeship for the technological exigencies of the modern Asia. That witticism was a world-class coinage, about the only first-rate thing the nation had ever inspired—one or two pugilists and all the entertainers apart—Boyet would think in gloomy moments. A more vulgar way of putting it would be that he found himself the citizen of a country that had been gang-raped by Dagoes for coming on four centuries and then put on the Yankee titty, or worse, for half the modern one.” - Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo

“Randy has gotten into the habit of reaching Intramuros by cutting through Rizal Park. This is not a direct route. The direct route passes over a no-man’s land, a vast dangerous intersection lined with squatters’ huts (it is dangerous because of the cars, not the squatters). If you go through the bark, on the other hand, you only have to brush off a lot of whores. But Randy’s gotten good at that. The whores cannot conceive of a man rich enough to stay at the Manila Hotel who voluntarily walks around the city every day, and they have given him up as a maniac. He has passed into the realm of irrational things that you must simply accept, and in the Philippines this is a nearly infinite domain.” - Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

“The eyes that blink back at you are puffy and red from weeping, but aside from that, your reflection reveals nothing untoward beyond the usual surprise at your Philippine demeanor. In all these years, you still have not gotten used to it. Thanks to your mother, who was mostly Welsh, you managed to avoid growing one of those flat-bridged noses that cause all Philippine women to look like tomboys, even those with truckloads of black lace bras and two thousand pairs of high-heeled shoes. Your crisp little nose is your mother’s gift, but everything else—your skin, your hair, your eyes, and mouth—came over on the gene boat from Manila Bay.” - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins

“The nameplates above the windshields had been one of the last revelations. Extraordinary that he could have known ‘Dragon Punch Lady’ ran the length of Edsa, or ‘Future Shock’ ran from Makati to Bicutan, but that he’d never wondered who the dragon punch lady might be, or what shock the future had in store. Extraordinary to live in a country that teemed with carefully thought-out messages, brightly emblazoned on huge plastic strips, that almost nobody ever bothered to read. Maybe this was why the owner of ‘My Secret Lover’ felt so confident about letting his secret out.” - The Tesseract by Alex Garland

The New York Times on new Brocka and Bernal DVDs.
“When the Torino Film Festival, in Italy, tried to mount a tribute to the Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka last year, the programmers were astonished to discover that only 5 of the 55 theatrical films he directed from 1970 until his death in 1991 existed in a projectable state. The others had been lost or allowed to deteriorate. . .”

Fabrica: Les yeux ouverts
Centre Pompidou, Paris
6 October - 6 November, 2006

Established in 1994, Fabrica is a communications research center whose range of activities extends from graphic design to cinema, taking in industrial design, writing, interactive media, photography and music on the way. Divided into four zones, the exhibition Fabrica: Les yeux ouverts will reveal to the public the work of a multidisciplinary research center whose horizons extend to the whole world.

We’re in the Colors Notebook zone, a project for Reporters Sans Frontieres. Blank notebooks were sent out to people all over for them to fill up with whatever (Freedom of speech being the theme). The finished notebooks are displayed in the exhibition or included in a video installation.

“Bow Wow Wow Philippines” features conceptual art by Leo Abaya, paintings and collages by Jay Lozada, assemblages by Stephanie Palallos, digital art by Guillermo Ramos, general fabulousness by Marlon Rivera, spooky bug-eyed children by Pol Sta. Maria, pornography by Ricky Villabona, drawings of dead people seen lurking around the neighborhood by Jobert Vizcarra’s children (who, being minors, were not exposed to the rest of the material or the artists), and text and serial killer calligraphy by Jessica Zafra.

Useless factoid: Jay, Marlon, Ricky and I all used to live in adjacent apartments on the same floor of the same Makati building, at different times, before we all met.

Post pictures later.

What I love about Martin Scorsese movies: the moment they begin, with those crazy swooping cameras locking on a face and that blast of pop music on the soundtrack smacking you upside the head, you know you’re in for a ride. You get a sense of the huge, thrilling world outside the screen. Over three decades after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver the man still gets a charge out of make movies, and you feel the voltage as you sit in the theatre, your hand poised to reach into a bucket of popcorn. When Marty’s really on, your hand doesn’t make it to the popcorn, it stays motionless in mid-air because all your faculties are engaged by the movie. Sure, sometimes the movie doesn’t live up to its opening sequence—I didn’t care for Gangs of New York and The Aviator, so I just blamed Leonardo Di Caprio—but so what. It’s the Cinema!

Watch The Departed, it’s in theatres now.

The next official flunky or power company stooge who says power has been restored to 99 percent of the metropolis will find himself gutted and used as a human battery like the poor schmucks in The Matrix, but without the simulacra.

Ted my publisher sent me the Director’s Cut DVD of Kingdom of Heaven and I can’t watch it so I’m just going to sit here and sharpen my broadsword in preparation for meeting those billboard people.

The thing is, it doesn’t feel like stealing. To call it stealing would be too sordid. You’re convinced that you’re restoring sense to an irrational universe. Why is that book on that shelf when, if justice and fairness truly exist, it would rightfully be yours? Why leave it there to be pawed over by cretins who don’t deserve to read it, much less turn its pages? To have those hallowed words register on the optic nerves of some creature who can’t read without moving his lips! It’s an abomination! Might as well smear your hands with peanut butter and jelly and touch Leonardo’s notebooks.

Or maybe you just want it. You have to have it, but you don’t have the money, and by the time you get the money it might be gone forever. Or maybe you’ve lived an exemplary life and you just want to do something bad, but nothing so tacky as to shoplift a shirt or a comb. A book distinguishes you from (other) petty thieves: you’re not filching a mere object, but a life with paper for flesh and ink for blood.

OF COURSE IT’S A CRIME. But at the exact moment when you casually take the book, slip it into your bag, and walk out the door, it feels like a mission. You are all that stands between the forces of enlightenment and the hordes of ignorance. You are a knight of the printed word.

You are a thief rationalizing your offence.

Here is your chance at expiation. Confess and be shriven. (If your pseudonym does not provide enough concealment, attribute the crime to “My friend”. My own friends I conceal under the names of royal houses, historical and science-fictional.)

Arisugawa-no-miya snitched The Complete Works of V.I. Lenin from Erehwon Bookstore in Katipunan in 1972. He assures me that Erehwon and Katipunan Avenue both existed in 1972.

The House of Zogu (royal family of Albania, possibly related to Florante at Laura), stole The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich from a bookstore. “It was a stupid, stupid thing to do since it was a hardcover book and more than a thousand pages thick, with a giant swastika on the cover. I just walked out with it on Avenida, Rizal, and forever abjured a life of crime. Never read the damn thing.”

Hohenzollern-Singmaringen swiped The Rape of Tamar from the Harvard library. The girl he was seeing at the time made him give it back. He never spoke to her again.

Thyssen-Bornemisza stole a Spanish-English Gideon Bible from a hotel room in Madrid. “I needed to work on my Spanish,” he explains. “That’s not stealing,” I point out. “The Gideons wanted you to have it.” “But you’re supposed to put it back in the drawer.” He insists it was stealing.

Hohenstaufen and Swabia took T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone from the Assumption grade school library. “I felt that it was mine to begin with—because it WAS mine to begin with.” She had left her book in school, and someone put it in the library. It still had her name on it, so she simply stole it back. Later she pilfered Economic Cooperation in ASEAN from another library, and is still wracked with guilt—not at the theft, but at the choice of reading matter.

Fushimi-no-miya made off with a Stanford University library copy of Little Brown Brother by Leon Wolff.

Borbon y Battenberg pilfered Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez from a bookstore “dahil sa pagmamahal ko kay Marquez. Gusto ko lang siyang kunin dahil wala akong pambili. Gaya ni Marquez, nagnanakaw ako dahil ganid ako sa kaalaman.”

House Corrino took The Philippine-American War, compiled by Fred Cordova, from the library of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but insists it was not stealing because they were going to throw out the books anyway.

Harkonnen-Atreides pinched The Collected Stories of John Cheever from a bookstore.

Fenring and Rabban hatched an elaborate plan to get free books. They managed to convince a foundation that their thesis room in the UP Department of Chemistry had a real library. For years they regularly received donations of chemistry and science-fiction books. I was a happy beneficiary of this scheme.

Confess.
P.S. “Too bad the Index doesn’t include perps who were actually caught. Are they now famous politicians or CEOs who have moved on to greater public larcenies (after trying to steal Archie Comics), or are they now lost souls, potential laureates who failed at stealing the one book that could have changed their lives? The evidence may still be found in fading mugshots scotchtaped to the broken glass doors of bookstores that closed years ago.” - The House of Zogu

1. I feel like I’m in Kabul. No power, no telephone service for two days. My Mac (James Tiberius Kirk—now you know what the T stands for) is powered by a very long extension cord plugged into the generator on the ground floor. There’s light in my building, but the generator hum is driving me nuts.
2. Is anyone actually named “Milenyo”? Then again there are people named “Heherson” and “Jejomar” so anything’s possible.
3. The malls are packed with humans driven out of their houses by cabin fever. Many areas still have no water service and electricity, so most everyone looks like crap. Remember in Tim Burton’s Batman where the citizens of Gotham stop using hairspray and other beauty products because The Joker has laced them with deadly chemicals? That’s what people look like.
4. You’d think that after a big storm it would at least be cold, but it’s hot and clammy.
5. From the Lifetime Underachievement Awardee: “I’m hearing that it could take up to two weeks to get The Big Queasy back to just the normal fucked-up conditions.” Manila, The Big Queasy. Brilliant.
6. Meanwhile, in Baguio, they’ve just unveiled the longest longganisa in the known universe. They can serve it with the biggest “toss salad” in the galaxy.
7. The streets of Metro Manila are covered with fallen billboards, electric posts and trees. The taxi driver put everything into perspective. “Wala na si Kris Aquino!” he cried, cackling madly.
8. My friend Tina went to Cash and Carry the day after the storm and reports that the shelves are well-stocked with rice and other food supplies. However, they are completely out of chips, chichirya, and soft drinks. Faced with impending disaster, the citizens panic-buy the basic food groups: junk food and soda.
9. Goddamnit I’m going to miss the replay of Jon Stewart’s interview with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. And Veronica Mars, which is my Buffy the Vampire Slayer substitute.
10. I’m always quoting from Say Anything (Cameron Crowe’s first movie, starring John Cusack and Ione Skye) and I just realized that I don’t own the DVD. Got Say Anything? I’ll buy you a coffee at UCC Rockwell.