"All Art Is Quite Useless"

"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless."

-Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Best Books of 2010

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Watership Down - Richard Adams

The Fidelity of Betrayal - Peter Rollins

For The Time Being - Annie Dillard

Mere Churchianity - Michael Spencer

A Week of eReading

I used to think readers and book-lovers were the same people. They're not.

Last week I took my family to Wisconsin to visit relatives. (Wisconsin is where they play football. It's cold there.) All of my reading for the trip - four flights, three quiet houses, and several long drives - was done on a new e-reader. I brought no "books."

The fate of the word "book" is akin to that of the word "church" - the skin is mistaken for the substance. That's what differentiates readers and book-lovers. Readers read. Book lovers love books. Of course, one can be a reader and still be a book-lover, and vice versa. All I mean is that it is quite possible to be one and not the other.

Dedicated e-readers use a technology called e-ink that almost eliminates glare. The following technical explanation - found on Wikipedia - is worth quoting at length:

"The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule to become visible to the reader. This makes the surface appear white at that location. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that location."

E-readers are excellent for travel, being small, lightweight, and versatile - three things paper books are not. Adjust the text size, search, highlight, lookup a word, or switch to reading something else entirely. A progress bar at the bottom of the screen shows you your position since you can't look at the book on end to see how far you have to go. Page turn buttons are located on both sides so the device can be read with either hand.

Sampling new books for free is an especially useful feature, as it saves me from spending money on books that are badly written, urbane, or simply over my head. (For some reason we feel smarter when we are filling our shopping cart, like we feel hungrier when we are filling our plate.)

In addition to sampling new books, there are millions of complete out-of-copyright books available for free in digital editions. Eliot, Pascal, Tolstoy, Melville, Chesterton: bring it.

The potential sterility of electronic reading was a concern of mine, and still is. For centuries books have been both intellectually and tactually unique. Like LP's or CD's, the medium of books created an opportunity for tactual and visual expression that was lost when the content was digitized. And so we cry all the way to the store.