I find myself often torn between simpler, comforting pleasures and deeper, more rewarding, albeit challenging, pleasures. Been that way most of my life but really ramped up during the pandemic/45’s reign of fearmongering. What do I mean? Like choosing between a comforting, familiar sitcom and a challenging documentary. In the height of fearmongering everything for me became about seeking out that sense of comfort, which became more and more elusive. But lack of substance, I’ve found, tends to make me MORE anxious. Like everything, it’s about balance, the middle way – comfort foods are fine but eat them all the time and you eat yourself into an early grave because they’re never fully satisfying. (If they were you wouldn’t want more and more and more).

It was this dichotomy that got me to searching for documentaries the other day on Kanopy, a great app full of thought-provoking films and TV. There I came across the documentary The Last Bookshop in the World. It was said to be about four literary people from different cultures who joined together to build a bookstore in the desert in order to preserve the written word. On the surface it sounded like something I would absolutely love – I love books, particularly printed books, and I lament the move away from them. However, we made it 15 minutes in before we just couldn’t stomach it anymore.

What I got from it, and what I have always struggled with in the literary world, is the tendency of people to look down on others who enjoy any sort of pursuits that are not “literary enough” or “deep enough.” That’s a major thing that has always kept me from going deeper into that world as I feel so repulsed whenever I encounter anything like that. If you enjoy books, if you love the written word, love feeling the pages, smelling them, immersing yourself in them and the stories that they have, then that is something that you would want to get to as many people as possible, not doing the opposite, which is what they did in the film, of going to a remote desert in order to set up a bookstore for people who only are so dedicated, and deserving of written books that they will make the huge trek out there to get them.

Bullshit. Anytime you make something more restrictive it’s for you NOT for others. When I was in high school in the 90s I was into underground punk rock and got angry when it became popular and the same people who would make fun of me for liking it now were wearing the T-shirts and boasting about loving the same exact bands that they made fun of me for. It made me angry, it made me feel like those people “didn’t deserve” to hear that kind of music, that they “couldn’t appreciate it,” but that, in exactly the same way, was bullshit. It was about me trying to protect something that I so highly identified with that any threat to its’ special status felt like a threat to me. Fuck that elitist way of thinking. If I could have seen clearly, I would’ve wanted more and more people to listen to that music, in the hopes that they would get the same thing out of it that I did, the sense of release and community and connection (and just some great freaking music), and in doing so they would become better people whom I could then more easily get along with. Hey, I was 15. I forgive my childish thinking. The people in this film are grown adults.

Early on they began railing against books with murder and violence in them, but there are hosts of great works of literature that are replete with violence. While I am not a believer per se, I can see The Bible, for instance, as an extremely important work of the written word. Well hell, the Bible did any and all works of violence before any of these modern books they’re talking about – incest, child murder, rape, etc – it’s all in there, does that make the Bible something to throw away as well? These people are laughable. It’s like a kid who doesn’t like that they’re losing a game so they take their ball and go home.

Yes, the entertainment industry is extremely invasive, getting into every part of our lives, especially in the West, and I do lament how so much of it lacks substance, lacks anything redeeming, frankly. But, taking the great works of literature and making them MORE difficult for people to have access to – how is that possibly going to help the situation? All it is going to do is give you a false sense of self-importance and self-righteousness. Garbage.

I am currently working my way through Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and really enjoying it. But, at the same time, I can enjoy a Disney movie, or a Slayer record, or any other number of “nonliterary” things. Anyone who simply looks down on you for things that you enjoy, without doing anything to build up things of substance that you may also enjoy, should take a good hard look at themselves and what they truly believe, not what they have convinced themselves that they believe. Anyone who is read about any great author throughout history will know that their life was extremely varied, and didn’t simply read “great literature” all the time and look down on those that didn’t. If they did they wouldn’t have had anything to write about! To write about people you have to know people, all sorts of people, not just ones you think just like you.

Also, while this purports to be a documentary, absolutely nothing about it feels like it, it feels extremely scripted and very slick in its presentation. I’m simply not buying it, not on any level. The landscape, however, is pretty beautiful. Cheers for mother nature.