For those of us who love books, libraries are sacred places. Ask any reader to describe their childhood library — if they were lucky enough to have one — and you’ll likely get a lovingly detailed portrait. (Mine? Down a staircase, smelling deliciously of old paper and rain and acetate book covers and possibility, and featuring a favorite librarian — I never knew her name — who had very long hair and a way of whisking cards through the stamping machine at a speed so breakneck I worried her fingers would get tangled.)
Susan Orlean, known for her literary nonfiction in The New Yorker and in book form (“The Orchid Thief,” “Rin Tin Tin”), grew up visiting the Bertram Woods Branch Library in suburban Cleveland with her mother, and treasured those trips. Over the years of her career as a writer, she occasionally had idle thoughts about writing a book about the life of a library. “It was nothing more than just thinking, wow, libraries are interesting places and I wonder how they work and wouldn’t that be an interesting book,” she said in a recent phone interview.
If the Foundation trilogy still appeals to a wide audience — as well as to corporations hoping to associate themselves with its vision of tomorrow — this has less to do with the plots or characters than with the books’ fictional science of psychohistory, a system for predicting future events even thousands of years from the present. The notion captivated fans like the economist Paul Krugman, who recalled of the mathematician and psychologist portrayed by Asimov as the creator of psychohistory: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon.” The books made an equally profound impression on a teenage Newt Gingrich, who later wrote, “For a high school student who loved history, Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the ‘psychohistorian’ Hari Seldon.”
One stormy night in 1816, while staying at Lord Byron’s villa near Lake Geneva, an 18-year-old woman tossed and turned in the thunder-filled darkness. Her name was Mary Shelley, and she was having a nightmare about a monster made from scraps of humans.
Frankenstein, the novel Shelley would fabricate from her vision, is regarded as a fable of science gone wrong. Yet it is also a rumination about art. Victor Frankenstein, the monster’s creator, is as much sculptor as scientist. Like Pygmalion, the sculptor from Greek myth, he makes a body and it comes to life. And what is this monster but a collage? A full century before the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Georges Braque, Shelley seems to have presaged every modern artistic discipline that sticks together fragments of the world, from collage to photomontage to assemblage art.
With these allusions to vampire folklore already swimming through the bloodstream of Marxist theory, it’s not difficult to imagine a reading of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula or Tod Browning’s 1931 Universal adaptation of Stoker’s tale as a parable of the perils of capitalism. Count Dracula’s bloodlust mirrors that of capitalism, where eros and thanatos commingle. The vampire’s continual need for possession and consumption resembles the ravenous thirst of capital, and the thirst it conjures up in those under its spell. Count Dracula, like a capitalist, grows in strength through his predation—a strength increasing in inverse proportion to his bite-victim’s weakening. Similarly, Marx pointed out, “the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labor and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out labor-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life.” There is also the self-replication of capitalist consumerism, consuming consumers who must continue the pattern of consumption, and the enslavement through this replication, which is there in Dracula too. “We become as him,” according to Mina Harker’s journal in the novel, “we henceforward become foul things of the night like him—without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.” For the vampire does not merely drain his bite-victim of his or her blood, the transaction is reciprocal—though not equivocal—with the victim receiving the vampire’s blood in exchange. “My blood now flows through her veins,” the Count gloats to Van Helsing. Through this exchange of blood, the bite-victim also receives the vampire’s curse, becoming a vampire, a bloodsucker, a consumer—Nosferatu.
In 2009, Alexander McQueen sketched a shoe that would forever change footwear, even for those like me who’d never try it on or even see it in person. The shoe was shaped like a crab claw and covered in glittering scales. It had a nine-inch spiked heel and an interior platform, where the wearer would stand on tip-toes, feet curved into the extreme arch of a plastic Barbie doll, or a ballerina in pointe shoes. It was aggressively ugly. McQueen didn’t intend to make these “armadillo shoes” (as they came to be called) available to the masses; they were designed as show pieces. The collection that season was filled with fantastical items, objects that came from a future where “the ice caps would melt … the waters would rise … and life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish,” McQueen said. “Humanity would go back to the place from whence it came.”
These shoes are ugly, and yet these shoes are beautiful. They captured the attention of Lady Gaga, who was gifted three pairs from her then fiancé, the actor Taylor Kinney (he bought them from Christie’s New York). This was after McQueen’s death and after Gaga had become famous for her grotesque displays, her willingness to contort her body and disturb audiences with extreme costumes and extreme performances. She posted about the shoes on Instagram with the caption “Look monsters, we got a sign of love from the beyond.” McQueen, most people agreed, would have approved.
It is uncanny when a book arrives at a particularly riveting moment, one in which the book’s reflection of current events is dizzying. How would an unsuspecting reader know that Bernice L. McFadden’s latest novel — a tale of modern-day slavery in another hemisphere, depicting the practice of trokosi — would resonate so deeply on our own shores?
Leonard Cohen does not use language to pose, startle or to reinvent. Words are his old comrades, and see him through to the end.