Jonathan Safran Foer on "Writing Life"

Last Thursday night I had the pleasure of taking a ride to Princeton with some friends to see a sort of literary interview between acclaimed author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates and, one of my favorite authors, Jonathan Safran Foer.

They opened the lecture with a quote from one of his workshops earlier in the day: "One should write out of necessity." He proceeded to discuss how he feels we write what we feel we cannot say in person, in real time. We write these conversations that we never get to have, whether we refrain from having them out of politeness or self-consciousness or distance.

It suggests this unspoken sharing among and between readers and writers. In such a highly individualized and impersonal society, there is this mutual sharing of sincerity that transcends physical and electronic connection. And it has to transcend anything that can traced back to that sentimentality. He and Joyce Carol Oates launched into a discussion of the 20th century embarrassment of sentiment in favor of this cultural irony that consumes our relationships.

And how accurate! Despite my desire to modernize the image of the library, I would be lying if I said I didn't fall in love with the romanticism of shelves lined with volumes and volumes of literature, the classic printed tradition. And to me, the impersonality and disposable nature of electronic resources like ebooks suggests that we no longer make those connections. Not only that we don't make them, but that we don't want to.

His latest book, Tree of Codes, challenges modern electronic print culture with the physicality of the text: a die-cut book that needs to be held and read from a print copy in order to get the full effect of his method, where he deconstructs one text in order to build his own.

Yes, the library is all about the integration of new technologies and modern connections, but we cannot forget where the sharing of information began: the origin of print. Foer reminds us what it means to be innovative while still celebrating the roots of literature, and it doesn't get much more refreshing than that.