I asked him what it was like to be nineteen, since I was curious and very far from nineteen. I was nineteen in 1975, and that was half a century ago. And he was an engaging 19-year-old who had come to ask me why I was binding a book at a poetry slam.
“It sucks, man,” said Pedro (I had learned his name by then).
OK—that part hadn’t changed much. It sucked for me, too, but for entirely different reasons. My life, I imagined at age 19, was in ruins. I didn’t know that that was the usual state of things: my life would be in ruins for as long as I let it be in ruins, or for as long as it kept bothering me. The first step in having a “perfect” life turned out to be in not caring whether you were doing it right, whether it was working, whether it made any sense.
But I was interested in Pedro, since he doesn’t have now, apparently, what I had and took for granted.
The day after I posed the question to Pedro, a transgendered person poked his automatic weapon through an open window in a church in Minneapolis. The killer’s name was Robin Westman, and she had apparently attended the school attached to Annunciation Catholic Church. Here’s the yearbook photo from when Robin was Robert.
The Robert Westman became Robin Westman, but there must have been a lot of changes beyond the sex reassignment. Robin killed herself after shooting the kids (and injuring 17 others), so we can’t ask her—what happened? We can’t satisfy our need to explain what is, at first glance, the inexplicable.
There might be no explanation, or it might be that we can’t bear to look at what we’ve become. Because it wasn’t Robert Westman or Robin Westman or anybody else that killed the kids and maimed the aged. It was the United States pulling the trigger. It was what we had become that killed us, or will kill us in the uncertain days to come.
We might as well celebrate it, since we don’t want to do anything about it. The solution is simple, and we all know it. The solution is to get the guns off the streets, and out of the hands of Robin. But apparently the only thing in the constitution that has any worth is the skewed reading of the Second Amendment, with its supposed assurance that any American at any moment has the right to grab an unbelievably powerful gun and shoot children.
We could prevent this.
We choose not to.
We like to kill kids.
If we could accept it, we might be able to change it. Instead, we look at the killer and find the clues to our liking that will explain why the (inevitably) quiet, polite kid went bad.
I say—get the guns off the street.
The Trump people say—see? Transgendered! Antisemitic posts in a journal! Calls for the death of Trump!
Wonderful—but why was the journal written (apparently) in English but using Cyrillic letters? Is there any meaning to it? Did he want to hide his thoughts from anyone stumbling onto his journal?
Our need to find “meaning” in this massacre is the problem. Pedro, the nineteen-year-old I spoke to at the poetry slam, grew up in a world where a shotgun poking through a church window was, if not normal or expected, certainly imaginable. I would have been going up to the gun nozzle, puzzled at what it was, and if anyone sticking the thing through a window needed help. Pedro would have been barricading the door and diving under desks.
Pedro was interested in books, and we talked for a bit about book covers. His favorite—or at least one of his favorites—was well known to me. Here it is:
The cover has entered into the collective conscience, apparently. It’s arresting, certainly, and I have used it for the cover of the slipcase that I put books into. In fact, I hate book covers, because they’re a symbol, to me, of how warped our culture has become.
Books are commercial items that must be produced (happy to help there!), targeted for marketing, directed towards an audience, and finally festooned with anything that will get the book off the shelf (hopefully passing through a cash register in the process). The back cover is filled with blurbs from The New York Times or from notable persons. The image on the front cover is curated and captivating. The cover, in short, is all about selling.
I want my books to be beautiful, not effective. The cover needs to protect the book and be pleasing to the eye. The spine—which I enclose in sheepskin—should feel soft in your hand. The pages should be thick. There should be—and God knows in my books there will be—a host of imperfections that speak of human hands. True—at some point the book will leave your hands and be put on a shelf with its brothers. I’ll print a bit of brown cardboard stock and attach the author’s name and title to the spine, but that’s about it.
Pedro didn’t ask me about cover jackets, and didn’t have to hear my screed / screech against them. A couple of decades ago, cover jackets were all the rage, and collectors paid twice as much for a book in bad condition with a cover jacket than they paid for the same book in excellent condition but without a cover jacket. It made sense, since most collectors don’t read. They just collect.
It's a wonderful thing, of course, for the people who read. The people who are interested in the book. The people who (rightly, in my view) detach the cover jacket and pitch it.
There were at least three approaches to book covers. For most of the history of books, covers were meant to be functional and beautiful. A marbled page on back and front, a leather spine—that was it. Watch any BBC history documentary filmed in an ancient library—the books are sober and drab. They were beautiful when young and the colors were fresh. They become somber and dignified as time passes.
There was a brief moment when hard covers became beautiful, and when some sort of détente was arranged between commerce and art. It was the Victorian age, of course, and here’s a nice example.
It’s beautiful, it’s functional, and it took a bit more time and effort. Besides the design, it had to be printed on book cloth and put on the boards of the cover. It stayed there as long as it had a cover. It was not some piece of paper that was an advertisement posing as a cover. It might even have been art itself, or suggestive of it. Here’s the 1855 cover:
Dude—the guy’s NAME doesn’t even appear on the cover. Apparently everybody in 1855—or at least everybody in 1855 who wanted to buy Leaves of Grass—knew that Walt Whitman had written the damn thing. And nobody suggested that the ornamentation on the capital letters was—perhaps—just a bit distracting, if not actually indecipherable. Speaking of which, the “of” doesn’t amount to much either.
But I support it, though the Victorian book cover had the same fate occur to it as occurred to the rest of society at large. It became cheap and commercialized, and in the end, we were all buying books that looked like this:
My God, did Whitman really get to be that old? Did they exhume the body to take a picture of it? I know William Carlos Williams (who wrote the introduction, as if the book weren’t enough) and I have heard of Malcolm Cowley (whose blurb escaped the back cover and moved to the front). The little blurb for The Modern Library is distracting. I would decrease the picture size and put a proper border around it. I would increase the size of the bottom textbox with Whitman and Williams’ names. I would make all sorts of adjustments, but am I a graphic artist or a bookbinder?
I might—and often have—come up with something far worse than the image above.
So screw it. I am not my clothes, and the book is not its cover. We just have to be presentable.
Pedro had that conversation with me, and then drifted off into the poetry. I met him later in the evening, and he was with his father.
A very nice guy.
Younger than I am.
We spoke, we said farewell, and I left with a nice memory. A father with his son at a poetry slam.
Robin Westman had parents too, and they opened the door to the police, who combed the house looking for clues to answer the question. The parents left the house that had sheltered the killer as the police looked for motives.
Pedro’s father took him to a poetry slam. Westman’s parents, unbelievably, seemed to have left the house to the police and found themselves sitting on the curb. The neighbors saw them there, looking blankly at the street in front of them.
Looking for a parade that never came.
