Recipes for Damaging Books (first published in Magnolia Review)

17 August 2022 by Rey Armenteros

When book sellers ship books to me, they might assure me that they will package them well. Days later, I will not be surprised if the book arrives damaged anyway. It seems to be fifty-fifty with the odds leaning toward how delicately the mail carrier handles the package.

Mail carriers drop things all the time. The postal people on my route don’t bother placing the packages before your door. They drop them from standing height; I can hear the thud from the other side of our home.

The most remarkable package I ever received was a box that was large enough to hold two comforters. Because the book was sixteen inches long, I recognized that it was a challenge to package. But when the thing came in, I was confounded. Not only was the box way too large for the book, it wasn’t properly packaged. The seller seemed to have put everything in, even some random paper towels, to try to fill it, in vain. In the end, the book certainly came damaged, and I contacted them, and I remember being none too polite about it.

I almost always contact a book seller when a book doesn’t make it to me intact. I take it on principle that if I buy the book new, it should arrive new. Most book sellers don’t care what condition your books arrive in. Most of them assure you, but they only do this as protocol. They know most people don’t complain. Many booksellers do no more than place them in padded envelopes. Some of them do even less than that. When a book seller responds to my request for packing the book well and the book arrives in a padded envelope, I understand that they might mean well, but they don’t know what they’re doing.

Most people might think a padded envelope is sufficient for a book to make it without damage. A padded envelope only protects against superficial damage, like attrition or light bumps and knocks. It does not protect against impact damage. Most people would assume that the hardcover endures such mishaps better, but that’s wrong. Impact damage affects hardcovers more. If it falls on one of its four corners, the corner will get mashed. If it falls on any of its edges, the edge will get notched.

Softcovers, because of their pliability, receive little damage by getting dropped, unless in the unlikely instance the book falls at a particular angle on one of the two corners connected to the spine, or when the length of the spine hits an edged object. So, padded envelopes almost always work for softcovers but not for hardcovers.

Sometimes, you get a book that has no packing. It may come in a sturdy box, but the book is allowed to slide around, bending all corners. When you get a group of books, the smaller books are used as packing against this kind of shifting, allowing for some of the books to make it okay at the expense of the others. Every once in a while, you get the serendipitous situation of a book fitting perfectly in its box. It is fortunate for the packaging person who thinks they do not need to deal with any packing material to fill the box, but regardless if it were packed or not, if that box falls on its edge or corner, that means the book fell on its edge or corner.

Outside damage is outside damage, but these incidents will hardly ever harm the interior, which most people would argue is the important part of the book. I understand that in the broad scheme, the book’s cover is inconsequential, regardless of how new you happen to buy it. But I can’t get past this, at least on books I buy new.

What is the best packaging for books? This is the question that I never heard asked in any circle of book lovers. But it is one that should be asked, if you love the book you’re packaging, say, when you are about to move. A book is a highly stable object when it is closed. If you drop a closed book, it might receive the impact damage I’m talking about, but it is just as likely that it won’t.

Have you ever thrown a book across the room? I have, and how it survives such a callous, desperate act depends on how it takes its flight. There are so many things that can happen before it collides with something. Usually a thrown book ends its arced trajectory when it hits a wall or piece of furniture. If it sustains its shape during flight, it may get no more than the damage I have mentioned so far. If it butterflies, the effects might be more complicated. Softcovers that butterfly can corrugate an entire cover, and the pages, since they are only glued, can get pulled off the binding. Hardcovers have less of a tendency for this because the pages are almost always sewn; such pages might get tears but they never come off. On the other hand, if the book does not butterfly, it becomes more of a stable object which flies faster because of the lower friction, and this might give it deeper dents or even a warped cover. The book I am thinking of looked like it had been mashed by a runaway printing press.

Small books are stronger than larger books. Larger books are a burden on themselves. Think about how much easier it is to snap a longer twig than a shorter one. I have a book on comics that would need its own table in order to be used. It is about the size of a headstone, and it weighs almost as much. I have tried reading this thing. You can’t merely lie on your stomach and read it; the top edge would be too far away from you. You can’t set it on your lap because it has the tendency to tip away from you, if the sheer weight of it were not a discomfort. How would you read a thing like this? The answer is that you don’t — not for any considerable amount of time. It was not intended to be read. It was intended to be displayed, either in some grossly proportioned bookshelf or on a pedestal made specifically for it. Since I don’t take any time to read it, except for a while during the Christmas season (which means two pages a year), it spends almost all of its time behind the closed door of a bookshelf. Every year, when I dig it out, I notice more warping on the curve of the spine. It is like being overweight and how the human spine might get damaged by carrying that excess weight. Large books will need to sustain more strain than smaller books. Smaller books are tight and compact.

Though I am focusing on impact damage here because that is the kind that usually happens to books damaged in shipment, there are other types of damage a book can receive en route to you. I have thought of a few.

Water damage. I knew someone that soaked scores of books on purpose to get an insurance claim. I saw these books in the dumpster later, and I peered closely without touching them. (If toilets are the easiest way to drench a book, I was wondering about the water they used.) The pages curled. This would not be disastrous if you don’t have mold. I think I have owned one or two books that did incur water damage, and once dry, the book was still readable, and since it was no longer new, it was interesting to hold and page through in its own way.

Tearing a book in two. (This is not likely to happen in a shipped book, but it could get stuck in a piece of machinery on its way to you, and hence get shredded in some inconceivable way.) I have found that there are a number of books that might arguably deserve such a fate, though we never talk about books on such terms as destroying them on purpose. My mother told me to never throw away a book, though there are a great many books out there that are no better than disposable TV. The lesson came in loud and clear one Saturday when my brother and I cleaned out our closet, and she found all our kiddie books in the trash. She made us take them right back and told us that one should never throw away books, ever! I have followed her commandment ever since because I understand where the veneration for such objects comes from. But in a way, it goes back to the question if the book as an object is important or what is inside it. If we forget about the book as an object and solely concentrate on what’s inside, then crappy books do in fact deserve to be trashed.

Pulling out pages from a book. There are two reasons why I’ve done this. You get books at your door about some spiritual well-being, and I quickly needed a scrap sheet of paper. The other reason is I bought a secondhand book at the thrift shop for the sole reason of making it into post-modern art. I tore apart and reconstructed this poetry book so that I can show it to my critique group seminar. Again, if the book is glued rather than sewn, it is easier to tear out discrete sheets. Otherwise, you get diagonal tears across the pages. Remember that book pages are folios that are folded in half, and that is the reason books need a page count divisible by four. Sometimes when you tear pages from a book, you can get the whole folio instead.

Setting a book on fire. I have never seen this happen, but I have seen the aftermath of a fire, and I can safely say here that if the packaged book is subjected to a fiery calamity, the remains will be indistinguishable from the remains of the packaging.

General attrition. There was a famous Dada work of art that was a book where the artist put a sheet of sandpaper on either side of the cover in order to wear away the two books standing next to it on the shelf. I suppose it was some form of statement against established ideas that come from musty libraries. Some attrition does happen to a book that is sliding around the inside of a box. It is most notable on books that have fancy covers that display glossy surfaces or a special finish like a foil embossment. Sometimes, an honest bookseller will admit in the book description that the book has some shelf wear or scuffing. This takes me to the idea of the safest bookshelves in which to store your books. Bookshelves made of cheap wood are usually smooth enough to have them do no damage by attrition. When you go to a bookstore, you’ll find that they use the cheap types of bookshelves made of particle board and formica. These shelves may bend under the weight of the books, but they hardly ever break, and they cause no such wear. These cheap shelves are always perfect as long as you don’t overload one shelf and bring it into danger of cracking and having all the books collapse. One of my bookshelves is a fairly nice one made of oak that actually wears away the bottoms of books because the wood on the shelf has a grain to it that acts like the sandpaper used in a Dada work of art.

Because I have received hundreds of books by mail, I feel I am somewhat of an expert on packing books. I have sent numerous messages to booksellers delineating the finer points of packaging; I know this sounds audacious because I am informing people who earn their livelihood from shipping merchandise. These people usually don’t respond or give me a tight thank you before dismissing me. Though they may have sent hundreds of thousands of books through the mail, they will never know how their packaging reaches their customers until one of us gives them the situation. And like I said, they base their success on the fact that most people won’t complain, and so their economics is based mostly on convenience, which means they don’t bother with any type of packaging that is too elaborate because it is more practical to send them out as quickly as possible.

Notwithstanding all these concerns about prolonging the perfect condition of a new book, there is an intimate esthetic to old, worn books. Here, I am talking about the kind you find on a book at a coffeeshop that has been riffled through by countless people. With such books that are worn and softened by use, I find it pleasurable to flip through the pages and hold this fuzzy object that does not oblige you to treat it carefully. It is an object that has had a history, and this idea becomes present when you find a few loving words in some stranger’s handwriting on one of the first pages.

I take an old backpack with me when I go to a coffeehouse or other place to linger. I like lingering in places that have windows and serve coffee, and I take my backpack stuffed with things to do at such places. This dirty old book bag only takes my dirty old books. I would never stick a new one into it. At a lingering place, I do not have to worry about spilling coffee on such books. This shows that I have two sets of standards when it comes to the conditions of books. If the warm fuzziness is to be expected, I welcome it with open arms. Otherwise, I have a hard time accepting a new book that is marred, especially before it ever reaches me.

My mother bought me a leather bound edition of a favorite book of mine for Christmas. I was looking forward to it. When I opened it on Christmas Day, I realized that she had taken the one copy among three (a one-third chance) from the one bookstore from about four in the area (about a one in twelve chance) that had the printing error: when they cut the pages, one of the pages was folded, and so if you unfold that corner, it extends beyond the dimensions of the book. I had seen this copy at the bookstore many times, wondering who would ever buy such a thing since it was obviously blemished? That Christmas morning, my mother was trying to convince me to not return it, that it wasn’t worth it, that it was special. “It’s one of a kind.” How could I keep a blemished copy of one of my favorite books? I was going to return it but never got around to it and eventually shrugged it off. The byproduct of this inconvenient situation is that every time I go through my books and find this one, I go to that page and bring back that warm memory.

I know that my exacting standards may actually be a personal problem. Could I go beyond such superficial notions like the condition of a book and get to what is more worthy?

I don’t know, but I’m trying. I understand what’s the correct way to look at things. Yet, there are certain books that by the nature of their beauty can only be seen in the best conditions, like that book on comics that may be massive but whose cover and whose pages glow with the transparent colors of old newspaper strips from one hundred years ago. This is a difficult object to casually drop on the floor, even if it does weigh almost as much as a headstone. In spite of this, when you take in a paperback that had already been beaten up, you not only accept it, but you might even find it in your understanding to elevate such a secondhand object to that of beauty. This sensibility comes from the same place in my thoughts that looks back at the very first books I still have in my possession and are now practically falling apart and yet more meaningful — by decades! — than a newly-arrived book in a perfect state.

A GOOD RECIPE: The ideal way to pack a book is to use a box with greater dimensions than the book. Place padding on the bottom and along the walls of the box. Place the book in this padding. Place padding on top. Make sure everything is snug enough so that their is no movement. Seal the box. Shake well to test it.

If such a package falls on its corner, the padding from the box’s corner should be sufficient to prevent the book from receiving any harm. If it is under a ton of other boxes, it should hold well with the padding at the top and bottom. There are variations on this. Try what you think makes sense and see if it works!

— Rey Armenteros

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay | Tags: essay, literature

The Newsroom Look (first published in Modern Literature)

17 July 2022 by Rey Armenteros

I wish I could put neckties in the wash. It is pointless to talk about it now. On a whim, that was exactly what I did, and now I have a hamper-full of ruined ties.

I have become the kind of guy that wears nothing if it does not have space for a necktie. There is a certain way I put myself together, and there are thoughtful reasons for this.

I used to work with a guy who was informing the group at the office that formal dress had its perks. The necktie, according to him, is to cover up the paunch. He was convinced of this, and yet there was no necktie made that could cover this man’s stomach. He was shaped like a skinny person who had half his weight accumulate in the middle front section of his body.

He obviously had it wrong. A necktie, if it had any illusionistic uses, was not to cover anything but to redirect attention. That thin, decorative line that goes down the front of your torso was made to place an accent under the head and neck and perhaps to provide a distraction from less attractive abdominal features.

For me, however, the necktie was never about that. It was something more subtle or maybe something that is so obvious, it is hardly worth mentioning. The necktie hid my identity under a bland look, a mode of dress that felt universally acceptable. No one bothered to take notice of such conventions in a man looking as if he were going to work, so it blended into the background.

Without following conventions too rigidly however, I wear shirts and neckties in a particular way. The newsroom look of old TV is over, but I go after the look that refers to the end of the day at the newsroom, worn by the kind of guy who has put in most of his hours at work and is just sick of the tie. So he loosens it and rolls up his shirtsleeves ready for even more tangle, for he is a man of action who still keeps a sense of professionalism by using the wardrobe of expectations to play the part.

The thing is I don’t resort to this look at the end of the day but employ it right at the beginning, and I have almost nothing in common with those old news hounds. But I identify with the look because it is the only one that now works for me. I prefer the half-Windsor knot over the other tie knots because it has an edge of the incomplete, and when you take it off, you have to unravel it multiple times to get the spirals out of it. In some ways, the four-in-hand works even better than the half-Windsor for that asymmetrical, loose appearance. A loosened tie under the unbuttoned collar is a lot easier on the neck. Rolled up sleeves require no ironing because half the sleeve is gone from view and the other half is crowded by the rolled up fold. The necktie takes the focus off the center of the front of the shirt, and the back shirt does not matter. So, if any wrinkles make it through this defense, they cause minimal alarm.

I guess I’m practical. When I had long hair, I was giving people a map legend to my characteristics, and they would take in this information and warm up to it or not. From a guy who wears a tie everyday — who wears it even to do his writing at home and sometimes forgets it’s on when cleaning the kitchen or taking care of a filthy garbage can — people pick up little more than a clean slate. This guy could be anybody. I’m giving people no stance with which to hold on, and I am letting them come up with their own conclusions if they have any.

A tie could raise certain stereotypes as easily as any mode of dress, but I feel that by tweaking my necktie habits with those newsroom features, I am giving them more at the same time that I’m giving them less. It is more because they are added details, and it is less because I am obviously not a businessman or lawyer or some small-time politician. So, what could I be?

Few people would be able to guess that I am an artist. I am the type of person that makes paper out of layers of paint and then draws on it with the same kind of paint and finally attaches it onto a panel to express himself and hopefully have others engage with it. I like that I am undercover because the assumptions people will have on me are going to be vague.

It helps that when I think about my look, I don’t give it more than the couple of minutes it takes to put on my tie. I don’t have to put my wardrobe through one of those major facelifts. I am content looking how I’ve been looking for these past years, allowing me to spend my creative contemplations on my art rather than myself.

How many artists have sought to live the life artistic, cramming all of their concentration on the appearance and little on the actual work? I am talking about the people that prefer to be seen as artists than to actually be artists. I used to be like that. I used to spend lots of time finding out who I was and what was the best way to express that in my look. Back in those days when my mind was occluded with the thought of every young lady I fancied, I was convinced that such young ladies preferred this creative, rebellious look over something like a shirt and tie. I would seek out outlandish clothes to appropriate the artistic sense. It took a long time to concoct who I was by how I dressed, deliberating over what types of clothing were the real me and which were the farthest thing from me. It all took time. Long, curly hair takes a lot of maintenance. So does well-groomed facial hair that creates patches of tufts on chin and mustache, on sideburns and soul patch. When you come up with a roving, elaborate wardrobe, it might take some moments of your day just to think about how you’re going to put yourself together. I was just like that.

The secret identity is one of those story themes that I could just not live without. While working at a teaching job, where I was forced to wear such things as ties and blazers, I’d tie my unruly hair up and take off the large hoops from my ears, and I’d pretend to be someone respectable. I felt comfort in knowing what no one in that class full of hot young ladies knew — that I was one of the fallen, a creature of the night, with powers of mystery allied to insatiable appetites.

I recall one young lady who thought I was straight-laced and would say I was such a nice guy. She only knew me at the workplace. And that only meant she didn’t know what I really looked like. When I was out on the street on a Saturday with my hair down, wearing my leather jacket and shades, I would walk past people I knew from the same workplace, and they would be looking at me right in the face, and they had no idea it was me. When I eventually went out with this girl, meeting her at a corner cafe, the look on her face said it all. That moment when you create that reaction in someone else was a real thrill! It was what I lived for.

That was the secret identity I held just for myself. It proved to grant years of fun, until I got bored with it. If the girl that got close to you learned your secret, she was in on the fun. With time, she couldn’t get enough of your unique insanity. She thought you were special and she would laugh when she would equate the two versions of you and actually witness the reactions in others when we would bump into them at a bar. At some point, I concluded that exhibiting every aspect of yourself to a person you’ve known for two months was not that interesting. The desired shock value had been disarmed.

And then one day, you start to become the butt of every one of her jokes. Now that she knew you, the mystery gave way to comedy, and this bright young lady would bring up details about your habits you hadn’t known yourself. I wanted everything my way, it seemed — to her, at least. She didn’t want to say I was selfish, but she went ahead and said it anyway. I no longer showed my feelings in public. It was a chore just for her to get me to hold her hand. I was the most unromantic guy she had ever met, and she would laugh about this as if it were an endearing feature in someone who was hopeless.

I was getting tired of it. My secret identity did not include large bouts of mundanity. After escaping from enough of these situations, that insane look became less essential, and I opted out of the long hair and the outlandish clothes and focused on what I had total control, and that was my art.

“And I never had a double life again,” is what I was about to say, but that is not true. I am the man with the necktie, and there is no secret identity to hold onto there, but I am also the man that places himself in the studio space to summon the insanity that was always there, and that second life is actually my first life, and it never sleeps, even when I have the newsroom look and forget I am wearing a tie until it dips into a spread of fresh paint, forcing me to scrub it immediately and to promptly succumb to the fact that the eye-catching designs on that thin stripe in front of me have acquired one more spot of color.

— Rey Armenteros

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay | Tags: essay, literature

Three Words in My Life (first published in HeartWood)

17 June 2022 by Rey Armenteros

I don’t have an occasion for every special word, but there are words that are tied to something in my past, like vernissage. I was part of a vernissage once. Before that fateful event in my life, I had never even heard of the word. This rare word contributes something to a small part of the art world. A vernissage is a private viewing of art before it is officially opened in an exhibition. Some collectors and patrons are invited to one of these things to maybe get a heads up on upcoming talent or to have first dibs on buying something.

My vernissage was for my MFA art exhibition. San Francisco was a perfect site for such an event. There was still a rich art aristocracy that was learned as well as passionate about art. They had their fingers in the city’s art interests, and this included our school because of the history behind it. The San Francisco Art Institute was the mecca for the art traditions of Northern California. Many of the mile markers of the area came through that school as teachers or students.

It was fateful to me not because I found success through the important people that skip the line by attending a special show but because I was now going out into the world to do something with my art, for better or for worse, like a debut. Every time I hear vernissage, I think of debutante, and then I think of me during this one moment when everything was right in front of me.

My cousin was visiting me in San Francisco once, and as we were catching up on old times, he was telling me that he was atrophying. I knew exactly what he meant, and it had happened to me too. If you stop working out, your muscles get smaller. We were discussing the finer points of maybe getting some of those muscles back (even though he was far too young to be worrying about such things). And now, every time I encounter that word, I go back to that moment when we were ambling around people on the Chinatown streets and talking on about shrinking muscles. It comes back to me through his mumbled words, the unresponsive look on his face. What I find funny is that was the exact word I would always use for that phenomenon. Now, I wonder if he was using it because I used to use it. Regardless if we can say it was my word or if he in fact acquired authorship over it through some other source, every time I think of muscles losing their mass, I go back to that word my cousin used, and in my mind, it is now his word.

Because I don’t have words for every situation, I get stuck when I try to move forward. I start guessing. Somebody might ask me a question, and I can stand exactly where I now am and piece something together with words as they come to me as I try to search for an answer. I am looking for the big words, and what I really want is that one word that would do all the work. These are the words that are supposed to be important, the ones that drop right in front of you to single-handedly solve a problem, and I can’t think of any right now. I can’t even think of a question grand enough that requires an important word to be dropped on an executive officer’s desk to impress this person with its very gravity. Even if such words may feel forced, they never fail to impress. I can’t count how many of these things have a story attached to them when I was learning them or when someone I knew misused one of them.

I like it when a word means nothing but something indirect to just two people. A word as an inside joke can spin a little laughter between friends. I used to use the word interesting for certain things but then resorted to fascinating when interest was not enough. It was a play by play thing, because most things were just interesting if they were not boring, but they would be fascinating if they really grabbed my attention. Well, that word’s primary role in my hierarchy of emphasis has developed an affliction because of this one time in Thailand.

Every time I think of fascinating, it now takes me back to a simpler time, when I was traveling with a good friend I have always held in high regard. There was no agenda, and there was nothing profound to describe. We were drinking on a rooftop in Bangkok and hanging out with his roommate from Estonia, and my friend was pursing his lips like a pondering scientist and lisping the word, “fascinating!” for almost everything I said. At first, it was annoying, but then it became hilarious, and I was soon going along with his goofiness because it was the first burst of life I had had in a long time. I was saying fascinating with that lisping facial expression alongside him, and we continued using it when we left Bangkok and traveled into the countryside, finding everything fascinating. And I didn’t stop using it when I left that country, bringing it up in other situations where the people around me had no reference to the history behind our word, when my friend was already long gone. That was the circumstance that disarmed that superlative expression and made it into a place marker for infectious laughter, and ever since that day, fascinating could no longer be greater than interesting, and I have never used it that way again.

— Rey Armenteros

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay | Tags: essay, literature

About to Rate Tender Buttons (first published in Dodging the Rain)

08 May 2022 by Rey Armenteros

I don’t know how to rate it. Tender Buttons is a classic. How can I not rate it more than anything else? And I like it. I loved it. It spoke to me when I was getting it here and there in anthologies. But I have now read the whole thing. And I can’t say… but it was very different. First of all, it was anything but spare. Spare is exactly what it was in the anthologies, but when you pack them all in one book, it gets a different feeling.

I’m going to say what I have in mind. These were thoughts that were coming to me. They were invading my reading experience. And I was pacing the room faster (since I pace when I read certain things). I was going at each poem, and then rereading them. It was tough work because, unbeknownst to me while I was reading three or four here in this anthology and five there in the other one, I had no idea there were some parts that were quite long. And it is hard for me to say this, but I have to say it anyway: I didn’t like them. I actually started feeling tense. It was the impatience brewing at the top of my head, the heat gathering there from this emotion and the constant pacing. I couldn’t stop myself.

Then I started thinking about it. What do I rate this thing? I rate everything on principle, even if it were a little beyond me. But this is poetry, and I have a wider rating curve for poetry. And this is Gertrude Stein. I do know Gertrude Stein, but I don’t know her work like I should. It’s that academic outlook that escapes me right now. That’s what’s missing here, any scholarly perspective on this thing that I might have had. It’s my ignorance I’m talking about.

But I’ve known poetry all my life, starting with those tiny morsels of vacuous moments that I scrawled on the back of something when ideas came at me as fragments.

What was art back then for me? I hardly remember. It has shaped itself to this — this thing I am now writing, the most recent attempt at anything! — and I can’t say anything about it. It morphed.

I want to give her four stars out of five on that site I use where I list all my reading accomplishments. I have to rate it something because I want to show I’ve read it, but a four stars sounds presumptuous for a prose poetry classic, as if I could do better! I don’t know. It’s a classic!

It was of its time. That much I can say. But I can’t stand lines like that. It’s an easy way out. I think those that say such things don’t really know what that even means. It is of its time, and if you’re not of its time, then you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

But I meant to say that it has a historical significance. Without Tender Buttons, what do we have to place in prose poetry after the French have had their way with it? It is an American first. And to say that Gertrude Stein’s masterpiece only deserves four stars is saying that it really wasn’t as important as we thought it was.

And it is saying that I obviously didn’t get it. “You don’t get it.” This was my first line of defense when I spoke to some unbeliever about a great work of art. If they didn’t get it, that means any rating they give something is based purely on opinion, which won’t hold much water when dealing with great works of art. But that is exactly what the raters want. Opinions. They don’t push anything else other than if you liked it and how much. They don’t care to know if it was really good or not. They want nothing more than a democracy of what the majority feels, regardless if they’re wrong or right. If everybody likes it, it’s obvious it’s good!

Well, what if everybody is a moron? A great number of people have voted for some of the worse things in life. You don’t have to go far to see what I mean.

No, my ratings at least attempt to be objective. If I didn’t personally like something but I can see it was great, then I have to rate it as great! Too often you read irresponsible reviewers taking the time to tell you that they can see that it was well-done, that they could see how others might consider it great, but it didn’t do it for them, and so they rate it a one star out of five. And this is incredible to me! It is as if they were perjuring themselves and admitting it to everyone!

Most people have an argument for everything. Most people would turn this back around and ask me how do we know it’s good if opinion is all we can go by?

The opinion argument has been strong only because it satisfies the lazy camp. It is much easier to throw your hands up in the air and say it was only your opinion than to try to defend your observations. Saying it is only your opinion is less confrontational when you say negative things because you are simultaneously saying it (the opinion) is worth almost nothing.

But I say we have to go beyond the opinion defense. It does nothing for a work of art, and it says little about its importance. I think most of us can intuit when something is great. Even if you don’t like it, you can still recognize the quality of something. If all of this is beyond you and you can’t understand a work, then I say, don’t bother rating it.

The second time I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I found it to be one of the most unpleasant movies, and I had no interest in ever watching it again, but I could still see — right before my eyes! — how brilliant it was. What would I rate it? Five stars! Of course.

I remember reading the new generation of art critics and theorists, and one of them defended a new outlook I found preposterous. He or she claimed that since an art reviewer cannot possibly know everything in this day and age of multi-everything, they can no longer judge but merely offer kernels of thought. That meant that since the experts are admitting their lack, the public, which has long had its fingers in ratings, can have equal say in the matter, regardless of expertise.

I have always wondered, who questions the suggestions of a medical doctor? The gathered information of a historian? The know-how of a mechanic? Why are we experts in the various fields of art questioned about our knowledge? I used to ask why don’t you offer an opinion about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity? I used to ask it until someone answered that they didn’t have to have an opinion about Einstein, but they can have an opinion about a book. And I never used that one again.

Look. I’m not saying I have all the answers about the deficiencies of the current rating systems used almost everywhere. All I’m saying is better solutions are out there, and maybe a better mind than the one I have can come up with a systematic way to objectively rate a work of art. I do believe it can be done. It may need to be a process that takes concessions, and it may need to change with time as a field of art changes, but it can be done. In the meantime, we have to at least try to be objective when rating something. That is why when I think of Gertrude Stein and Tender Buttons, I really don’t know what to rate it. I am really not qualified because whatever I thought I understood in snippets here and there came loose when I read the entire thing. Fifteen thousand words of borderline nonsense is hard to take, whereas three lines of it is utterly charming.

So, I shouldn’t rate it, but I have to — because I have rated everything else! I think by my long understanding of literature and art, it is worth four stars, primarily because it required too much patience from the reader, pushed the boundary a little longer than what is expected, and almost snapped the tether that was restricting its rhythms and forms. Where was Gertrude Stein’s sense of propriety as a poet? I don’t think she ever had the reader in mind. If I were honest, I’d give it four stars, and that is my best as a rater of this one work of art, but I am a coward, and since I do not want to show my ignorance on my sleeve, I get online and rate it a five.

— Rey Armenteros

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay | Tags: essay, literature