That’s what we’re here for. The books. Nothing we do is more durable or meaningful. I believe this more and more with all my heart. The weirder the world gets, the less meaning there seems to be in public discourse, the more I feel: BOOOOOOOOOOOKS. Printed, hefty suckers, immutable and offline. Moar. I trust books as a medium. I trust how they get me to collate my thoughts in a way no other medium does. Their arc can be long and infuriating (years from conception to release), but there is a density of committed effort present in a book held in hand that cannot exist in a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.
I’m working my way through the page proofs of Ribbons of Green, the new Fleck/Berrens joint, on shelves in June. We’ve got a Feb. 20 deadline to get stuff back to our friends at UNM Press. It’s a project to be savored, this final run through the page proofs, the last step in the chain from manuscript->pdf-page-proofs->”printed, hefty.”
The number of public words I have written in my life is large. I recently had occasion to download the corpus of this blog, dating to 2003: 6,500+ posts, 1.4 million words not counting the comment threads, which used to have a lot of my words in them too. 37 years of daily newspaper work is likely another 2 million words (big error bars on that second number, but it’s likely in the ballpark, maybe +/- 500k?). I loved all of that writing. I never didn’t love doing it, learning stuff, crafting strings of words to share what I learned with y’all – the constraints of the structure of a newspaper story traded off against the utility of being handed a sizeable audience right out of the gate; the elbow room of the blog, to break out of the constraints of the newspaper form and say “fuck” sometimes and also be fully opinionated and weird. Writing about bike rides and stuff.
The books – Water is For Fighting Over, Science Be Dammed (with Eric Kuhn), and Ribbons of Green, (with Bob Berrens) are tiny in comparison, but it’s in the density that they become the thing Mod is talking about, pursuing/sustaining a line of thought for 75,000 words, the drive to say something useful and new at scale.
I’ve got nothing against, as Mod put it, “a YouTube video or a thousand Instagram Reels.” I’m a blogger! One of the surprises of my Inkstain data analysis project has been the volume of stuff I wrote on the the blog in 2014-15 when I was using the blog really aggressively as a sketchbook for the work that became Water is for Fighting Over – three words on the blog for every word in the book. The ephemeral stuff has value too, I could not have lasted through a 37-year newspaper career if I didn’t believe that.
But the book’s the thing.