Gabriella Coslovich, shoe collecting, and the joys of abusing books

(Above: oh Imelda, pardon me while I slobber and faint).

There's a lot to be said for shoes ... their solace, their smell, their texture, the older ones growing creased, discoloured, flecked, as though developing age spots and lines to match my own.

I like to survey my collection of boxes - each labelled with a photograph - and sometimes get them down and pull out an old favourite shoe contained therein, and run my fingers over the embossed leather.

It seems Michelle Obama shares this obsession (here) but of course the queen of shoe fetishism was Imelda Marcos, who when she fled the palace with Ferdinand, left behind what was reported (by her) to be a mere 1,060 pairs - not to mention 65 parasols, 15 mink coats, 888 purses, 508 floor-length dresses and 71 pairs of sunglasses (or so I'm told here).

Now you might think shoe fetishism somehow strange or quaint or alarming, but is it any more bizarre or alarming than book fetishism? Especially as outlined by Gabriella Coslovich in E-books lack the magic of the real thing.

Mourning the way Amazon indecently bragged that it sold more e-books on Christmas day than the physical variety (here) she gets quite Imelda about old-fashioned books:

The electronic tablet that is Kindle could never compete with their solace, their smell, their texture, the older ones growing creased, discoloured, flecked, as though developing age spots and lines to match my own.

I survey the titles and pull out a favourite, running my fingers over the embossed letters on its hard cover: “Joan Didion” in red capitals, The Year of Magical Thinking in celestial blue, and four letters picked out in gold, the J in Joan, the O in Didion, the H in The, and the second N in Thinking. They spell out JOHN, the man whose spirit permeates the book – Didion's dead husband.

Just as his spirit refused to leave her, the opening lines of Didion's book possess me: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

I marvel at their heartbreaking economy. They remind me, in turn, of Franz Kafka, who once said, “A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

How do I know it's a kind of fetishism? Well she gets quite rhapsodic in a way I've only experienced once when a pantie sniffer confessed he sometimes felt inclined to act like a member of the Western Australian parliament:

Hold them, flip their pages, bury your nose inside and inhale, deeply! Kindle, on the other hand, is uniformly slim and odourless, whether you're reading Albert Camus' The Outsider or Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex.

I was totally on board - after all, any kind of fetishism, be it panties, underpants or socks, has a place in life. Especially if it involves sniffing. Strange that Coslovich hasn't discovered the pleasures of sniffing machinery and computers, especially those fresh out of their plastic wrapping, but never mind. Whatever she wants to sniff is alright by me.

And then I discovered that in fact Coslovich was a vandal, a visigoth, an ostrogoth or some other kind of northern Germanic tribe with a taste for destruction. Leaving aside the deep urge to sniff books, it seems Coslovich mainly likes them because she can scribble on them, or underline words in them, or otherwise mutilate them:

My second-hand copy of Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up, in which he offers his views on life and writing, is a stoic old hard back with ochre-stained, crinkle-cut pages that exude a scent that should be bottled — the rich, musty smell of libraries, of silence, of the interior life. I ordered it on AbeBooks and was thrilled by what I found within: signs of another life, that of a certain Margaret Rives Kearfact, who, in an elegant cursive hand, has dated the book August 1, 1938, and made copious notes. Did Margaret long to be a writer? I know she loved words. She has made a list, in pencil, on the inside back cover: passementerie, adumbration, fecklessness, solipsist and concatenation are but a few.

We share a habit, Margaret and I: we love to underline. But I dared not add my underlinings to hers. In any case, we seem to have similar tastes. I wholly concur with her emphases, such as on this: “Words have weight, sound and appearance.”

Oh dear, I hate underlining as passionately as I'm sure I'd hate someone using a marker pen to highlight the wonderful qualities of a decent shoe.

Worse, Coslovich likes books because she can mutilate them. Now I'm into perverse sexual activities as much as the next middle class Australian, but she goes too far:

Can you dog-ear a Kindle, can you feel the dog-ear and wonder what treasure it has marked? And how do you translate the white space — so much white space in The Monkey's Mask — space as portentous as the words, space that allows the language to breathe, or ache, or axe?

Dog-ear a book? Why next she'll be talking about burning them, because that's surely the fate of dog-eared, heavily underlined, mutilated texts, where someone has given a book a good pounding and ruined its spine through obsessive sniffing. Or other more extreme and indecent physical activities. (Though I've yet to hear how someone likes to give a book a good fucking). But back to the despicable Kindle and its falsity:

And did anyone consider the weight of the word “Kindle”? What marketing wizard came up with it? I suppose Kindle is meant to evoke kindling, a blazing hearth, mulled wine, curled up cats, snoring dogs. But all I can think of is a concerted campaign of book burnings.

Oh dear, it's just another bout of luddite-ism 101. And is there a hint of Godwin's Law swear jar money in the talk of book burning? As if Kindle was a Nazi doing its own kristallnacht.

As if having a Kindle is going to sweep all the physical books from the world, as if Coslovich can't keep her collection of books alongside her collection of long playing records, 78s, vhs and beta tapes, 8 track cartridges (best of all in the quad 8 format), and compact cassettes. As if she can't have physical books and a Kindle too in this wonderful world of secular materialism.

Because that's what happens when people confuse the container with the contents, and fetishise the container rather than the contents. And no, I'm not going to start writing about foot fetish folk. You can keep that kind of furry thinking for another day. Just give me the shoes.

Not that there's anything wrong with a fetish - let those who are without shoes cast the first stone. And Coslovich is deep in the grip of a fetish:

I look back to my shelves and take them all in, all these books, stacked, slouching, standing, squeezed, waiting for the moment I pick them up again, or read them for the first time. In an instant I perceive where they have been, what we did, what they meant to me, mean to me still. Every one of them has a story beyond the story within. And I do not want it to end.

Well as a recovering book addict, and as someone who still has a merged collection of LPs sitting in the lower reaches of a book shelf, and as someone who's run out of room for other weird cultish collecting activities, it seems the Kindle - or more likely, its soon to be announced Apple follow up - might actually offer some hope.

No more dog-eared books, underlined by compulsive obsessive wretches who think their markings are as meaningful as the writer's scribbling.

And best of all, no more drunken spider scrawls on the inside cover from long lost former friends or partners who thought they were with me for life and who pop up inside books because they scribbled a fatuous dedication:

Where will these dedications go on Kindle? The boffins have ensured that annotations can be added to the text (“just like you might write in the margins of a book”), but in the digital age these notes can be wiped out in an instant — and an electronic note will never be the same as a handwritten homage bursting with as much ardour as if it were written yesterday.

Eek, you mean you can scribble in a Kindle too?

Well it's only fitting to return to Imelda:

"What's wrong with shoes? I collected them because it was like a symbol of thanksgiving and love?"

"I was born ostentatious. They will list my name in the dictionary someday. They will use 'Imeldific' to mean ostentatious extravagance."

Boy, bring me some grapes and some books.

After I've peeled the grapes, I feel the need to spend a day underlining and sniffing and scribbling and marking up some tomes ... and then dropping them off at the local op shop so some innocent punter in search of a dollar bargain can see the joys of a well used and abused book.

Meanwhile, is it too much to ask for a temporary injunction against folk blaming the intertubes for the death of test cricket, or the death of civility, or the death of any other aspect of modern civilisation they adore, and computing for the death of the book, the music industry, the film industry, or any other pet fetish?

Which reminds me of my pet gripe about Avatar.

Not that it cost me twenty bucks to watch blue activists carry on like anti-whalers in the Antarctic - never mind the five dollars fifty for a choc top - but the associated incessant industry whinging about piracy, which is just like Coslovich whining about the fate of the book.

Because my humble twenty bucks has helped the local industry head towards a turnover of close on one billion or so in ticket sales, the highest turnover ever. A record.

But, but, but wasn't piracy ruining the industry? Like Kindle is ruining books?

Hang on, how could you pirate a 3D show that needed special glasses and would resist the cleverest Chinese citizen armed with a minicam?

So why do I keep having to endure all these ads which treat me, a faithful nine foot tall well shoed high heeled blue indigenous customer, as a potential black hearted pirate, with all kinds of dolorous entreaties about how I was ruining the local Australian industry, robbing it blind? When in reality you couldn't give away the average low budget Australian show at a charity event for street people.

Never mind the truth, feel the rhetoric, seemed to be the philosophy of the anti piracy anti intertubes forces, as their rhetoric constantly outstripped the reality of the box office figures, and they blamed piracy for the misfortunes of sombre local shows, thereby conflating the local production industry, the producers of the local show Wolf Creek (the poster for which is always going up in flames to show the suffering), and the American focused distribution and exhibition sector, which are doing very nicely, thank you very much ... and without much regard for the flailing, failing Australian produced films which run for a week in Woop Woop before disappearing to DVD.

And worse still, the buggers put the anti-piracy ads on DVDs in a 'forced' way, which is to say encoded with a flag that prevents my player from skipping the message.

Which led me to a new year's resolution - any time I see a 'forced' anti-piracy message on a legally acquired or watched DVD, I will feel legally and morally obliged to rip the disc and distribute three copies in random acts of kindness to passing strangers.

So it goes. Golly, it's going to be a busy year, what with the book burnings, and the mutilations, and the piracy and ... what else have you got?

(Below: google book fetish with your filter off and you find many strange images. You might even find yourself at the blog of a book fetishist here. Quick, before Senator Conroy taps you on the shoulder. Yet another service for discerning gentlemen readers).