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Point: Book Culture Must Be Salvaged by Raymond Smathers, PhD
Academia is in crisis. Our libraries are crumbling, disciplines like history, English, and the classics face extinction, and books spend most of their lives collecting dust. In the face of an increasingly digital world, it’s imperative that our academic institutions uphold the remnants of book culture. Book culture must be salvaged.
Thirty years ago, book culture flourished. The academy once celebrated the book as a cultural institution, devoting record funding to new libraries, authors, and publications. Now, with the advent of the internet, book culture faces a reckoning. Academia’s grasp on knowledge-production grows weaker as the blog replaces the memoir, the video essay eclipses the academic essay, and the Tweet subsumes the poem. Put simply: we are at a crossroads.
As online media continues to erode our sense of the real, it is critical that colleges and universities re-invest in book culture. Our institutions must erect new libraries, sponsor local novelists, and host forums through which book culture can be explored, discussed, and valued. Furthermore, primary and secondary schools must reintroduce books to children as hallmarks of learning to be cherished, not discarded. Book culture warriors must continue the fight for the book’s preservation.
It’s time for a Renaissance in book culture.
Counterpoint: Books Are For Eating. Have You Guys Not Been Eating The Books? by Nicholas Book, Inventor of the Book
Wait wait wait wait wait. Have you guys not been eating the books? You know, the edible snack that’s fun for the whole family? You haven’t been eating them? What kind of sick bullshit have you been doing with them, then? Books are for eating!
When I invented books, I couldn’t have made it more obvious that they were for eating. Books are sandwich-sized for a reason, people! When a book is bound, it gets shipped to the nearest grocery store, where customers can pick out their favorite kind of book and take it home for a delightful culinary experience. It’s crunchy, but also savory. It’s tasty, but it’s lean. What the hell is so hard to understand?
I spend my entire life designing the perfect snack, and you guys just sit around and do what? LOOK at them? Are you fucking nuts??? You just let them sit there for years and then pick it up and look at it for two hours, and never once have you savored a single bite?
“Book Culture”? What the fuck is that? Are you joking?
Everybody needs to take every book they own and eat it immediately. Books are for eating, and it’s time we all start acting like it.
