“The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no longer clearly create distinct relationships with friends, foes, and fast food — either because I can’t figure out how or because Facebook is preventing me outright.

“For me, the overwhelming connectivity to everyone and everything, without much control over those ties, feels like I’m no longer connected to anything, and meanwhile, outside groups benefit.”

Laura McGann has deactivated her Facebook account and here’s why. (via Bookforum)

I’ve been hearing lots of arguments about how we should all quit Facebook. From countless privacy issues to F.B. hiring former Bush administration stooges, lots of well-intentioned folks have made strong cases for quitting while the next moment logging in to make a comment about their friend’s Youtube post. Facebook’s addictive nature is the strongest reason for deactivation, at least in my opinion.

But I still won’t do it. . . not until my friends do it. See, it all goes back to peer pressure, the only thing I really learned in grade school.

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It’s not heroin. I should have been able to stop myself. But I couldn’t. Really. I wasn’t getting any writing done. I was ignoring my girlfriend and my friends. I was reading George Packer’s musings on how all this technology needs to stop and tearing up. I read this article about heavy web users being depressed. I agreed. I checked my email again.

And then, I found this essay at The Millions about a student who had to go to a corner of the Coop in Harvard Square where the wireless didn’t work  to get writing done, and, after chuckling at the irony, I decided to do what he did.  I had heard about a coffeeshop called Borderlands Cafe, affiliated with Borderlands Bookstore, that had opened just a couple months ago here in San Francisco.

Not only do they not have wireless, but they don’t have music, and everything is remarkably well lit. 

By the time I left the coffeeshop, I’d cleared my head and written 3,000 words. With the Internet and music to distract me, it would take me a month to write that much, and I would have ended the day more panicked then when I started. I also couldn’t help but notice how many people were buying magazines and coffee. Even more striking was how many people thanked the barista for the store’s policies.

I was grateful, too. Not having wireless or music was a brave move on their part. So I sent Alan Beatts at Borderlands Cafe an e-mail (from another coffee shop down the street) with a few questions about their policies, and he was kind enough to respond.

Rumpus: Why did you decide not to have wireless or music and to keep the place so well lit?

Alan Beatts: The question of wireless was one that I considered for quite a long time. Even up to the last month before we opened I was on the fence. But, during the process of writing our mission statement, I realized that our focus on creating a social space rather than a work-space and my desire to encourage people to interact with each other made the decision about WiFi pretty clear. I’ve observed and been told many times about how the availability of Wi-Fi creates a space where people are wrapped up in their own, solitary world and not interacting with each other. That was not the kind of place I wanted to own or work in.

The question of lights and music both came from my intention to make the literary world an intrinsic element to the cafe. Since I come from bookselling and the cafe is a child of my bookstore, it was a logical fit. Most of the writers that I know do not work to music (at least not music with vocals) and I know that I can’t write when someone else’s words are rocketing around in my head. That, combined with the social element that I’ve mentioned both argued against music (it’s hard to talk when the music is loud and, if lots of people are talking, you have to turn the music up if it’s going to be heard). All that said, it’s possible that we may have music playing at sometimes in the future, since there’s also an attraction to a bustling, noisy space on, let’s say, a Friday night. But most times, the cafe will probably be pretty quiet.

And as for the lighting, it’s hard to write and impossible to read in the dark. And, I personally like well lighted spaces to work in.

Rumpus: Have you encountered many customers who are upset by your policies? Have you encountered many who are grateful?

Beatts: Not many (are upset), really. And most of them don’t become customers. They walk in, ask if we have WiFi, get a negative answer, and walk out. But for each person like that, we probably get ten or more who say how much they like the absence of it. And probably half of those people comment positively on the absence of music. I know for a fact that there are two writers (friends of mine) who really appreciate being able to concentrate on  writing rather then getting distracted by email, instant messages, and the web.

In closing, I should probably point out that I love music and noisy cafes as well as having nothing whatsoever against Wi-Fi or the Internet in general. I’m constantly grateful when I travel that there are cafes with Wi-Fi out there in the world and I think it’s a very valuable service that the owners of those places offer the public. And hell, I used to run nightclubs — I adore a loud place with a million conversations bubbling in the background and music thumping down. But, I wanted Borderlands to be a bit different and conducive to pursuits that benefit from some calmness and limited distractions. And it seems, based on the feedback, that there are a fair number of people who appreciate it.

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A self-help guru finds herself spiraling out of control. Her therapist and her best friend have moved away and, just when she has to start promoting her book on how to stay skinny, she’s gaining weight. What to do?

Write a book about it. The result: Susan Shapiro’s Speed Shrinking. It’s called a novel on the cover, but this book is really an awkward hybrid that falls somewhere between fiction and memoir. Shapiro and her protagonist, Julia Goodman, are both authors of book on conquering nicotine addiction (Lighting Up and Up in Smoke, respectively) with the help of a domineering therapist. Both are married to TV/film producers who threatened to write rebuttals to their memoirs. Both hate the book Why French Women Don’t Get Fat (called French Women Are Never Flabby in the fictionalized version). And both started to expand a little when their closest confidantes suddenly disappeared—just in time for the release of their books on conquering food addiction.

In an interview with Editor Unleashed, Shapiro explained that she started Speed Shrinking as nonfiction but her editor said “it wasn’t dramatic.” So she upped the weight gain and made the story a little bit busier. But not much. Covering a year in the life of a successful, happily married author who happens to be a little chubby, her resulting novel circles around a whole lot of nothing.

In Julia’s world, the controlling therapist and the best friend move away at the same time. On top of that, the (surprisingly sane) husband gets a job in Los Angeles. Having successfully given up cigarettes, pot, alcohol, bread and gum, she finds herself sinking back into bad habits—specifically, cupcake icing. (Loving descriptions of sugary topping are some of the most moving parts of the book.) With her new book on how to conquer food addiction out in a few months, a desperate Julia tries a series of shrinks to keep her weight under control—giving “speed shrinking” its clever double meaning.

Susan Shapiro

But Julia is so reflexively self-diagnosing that it’s hard for a reader to get a thought in edgewise. She and her father share “the same genetic addictive tendencies.” Her problems stem from parental neglect, growing up as the only daughter in a group of boys and then moving to New York instead of staying in the Midwest. She seeks out male therapists for the approval she never got from her father, and mentors younger authors to replace the daughters she never had. All of this is spelled out for us, and Shapiro doesn’t give Julia a chance to reveal herself as a full character. For all her aggressive strangeness, she’s the least interesting person in the book.

Even her food obsession, the central crisis of the novel, turns out to be something less than a crisis. Julia decides there’s nothing really wrong with her—she just wants to lose some pounds. “It appears the most original, radical, shocking stance I can take is to love myself while still wanting to weigh 128,” she says after another therapist refuses to be her diet doctor. Another tells her, “You look fine and your weight talk is superficial and trite.” It’s easy to sympathize.

Shapiro’s other characters come off a little better. Both the autocratic Dr. Ness and his replacement, the laidback Dr. Cigar, can actually be funny and genuinely surprising. Her affable husband isn’t particularly interesting, but his one-liners are a welcome relief from the whirling dervish inside Julia’s head.

Shapiro manages to rub together some entertaining drama when the old therapist betrays her and the new one gets uncomfortably close. And there are occasional flashes of human emotion in her interactions with her family. (The best friend is a selfish non-entity.) But these conflicts play out in a shallow pool, and Speed Shrinking is more concerned with up-to-the minute minutiae (Spanx, Facebook, Sarah Palin) that all but ensure it will go stale as quickly as a gourmet cupcake.

The book’s big joke is that Julia is a self-help guru that can’t help herself. Far from figuring everything out, she’s built up a fantasy of having been healed through addiction therapy when what she really got out of it was a publishing deal. Fittingly, her advice to all her struggling friends is to write a book. Maybe it worked the first time, or even the second. But as any recovering addict knows, sometimes it’s better to just say no.

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Enriching the picture is a 2006 Minneapolis Star-Tribune profile which says Gibbons declares “I decided and had it confirmed that I’d been misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder for years and years… I stopped taking all medications.” Unfortunately, when someone who has been treated for bipolar illness for years “decides” she has been misdiagnosed and stops taking her medications, little good usually comes of it.

Curiously, there is a hint of addiction even on her author page on her literary agency’s website, where she says finishing a book requires “more Diet Cokes than most people can or want to tolerate.” The statement is undated, as is the accompanying picture, clearly taken long before her arrest mug shot.

After pleading guilty to misdemeanor drug charges and serving a 90-day suspended sentence, Gibbons is reported to be delivering anti-drug talks at high schools and working on a new novel set in Reconstruction-era New Orleans.

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by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins.

Children are encouraged to believe that reading is good for them, like community service, flossing and green beans—and as with these things, that implication is often enough to turn them off completely. But when I began reading as a child, books were less about exploring the human condition than they were about the pulse-quickening, mind-reeling pleasures of suspense, imagination, and assured gratification. Reading was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. No matter if the prose was workmanlike and the themes well-trodden. No matter that J. R. R. Tolkien’s characters were static archetypes, C. S. Lewis’s plots were exasperatingly moralistic, and J. K. Rowling’s books became stultifyingly popular. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.

Freud’s concept of the “pleasure principle” maintains that to some extent our actions are governed not by reason, but by an abiding pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of discomfort and pain. Food, drugs, sex, and video games are the pleasure incentives of choice for many adults, and each of these can become addictive to the exclusion of exterior reality. My personal history of pleasure-reading-abuse confirms that it shares features with all of the above: foregoing social opportunities to hole up alone; bingeing to the point of delirium; losing myself in an illusory world; waking up blearily the next morning, catching sight of my book, and wondering, “What the fuck happened last night?”

Not all books lend themselves to literary benders. Or maybe it’s that not all readers feel the effects. As a young reader, not surprisingly, fantasy books with an abundance of wizards, swords, and talking animals was my catnip. I craved the comforting, structured pleasure of stories where virtue is rewarded, ordinariness is surmountable, and the forces of good and evil are etched in unsubtle diametric opposition. If a character skulks, looms, or sports a black cloak, you can be damn well sure he’s an agent of evil. If the protagonist is thrown into company with an attractive but prickly member of the opposite sex, you can pretty much bet they’ll be getting it on by book’s end. These books are predictable in their rewards, but varied enough in their plots to keep readers wriggling expectantly on the hook. They tamp down anxieties by simultaneously introducing conflict and guaranteeing resolution, pairing “What’s going to happen?” with “Whatever it is, I’m going to like it.”

Easy pleasure, however, leaves little room for growth, and maturing adolescents and educated adults are encouraged to venture past the safety of snug plots and simplistic ideologies. Postponing gratification for hard-earned gains isn’t easy, whether it’s in intellectual growth and emotional depth or a steady paycheck. But with maturity, according to Freud, comes the “reality principle,” pleasure’s grim repo man, where the exigencies of life take center stage and personal pleasures must regularly take a rain check.

The transition to literary novels, like adolescence itself, was a strange and uncomfortable process. After exhausting library shelves of fantasy trilogies, cat mysteries, and low-hanging YA fruit, I moved on to the adult section’s more high-minded fiction. This proved to be thematically and structurally jarring, especially since I had no concept of my own preferences, and chose books mostly by their cover art. More importantly, these books were work—and I wasn’t used to having to invest before seeing dividends.

But what about reading? Bruegel's "The Seven Deadly Sins"

Literary novels, which I still sometimes think of as “grown-up books,” tend to require more commitment, focus, and willingness to set aside easy pleasures than your typical swashbuckler. In these books, characters are often unlikable, plots stunted, romances ill-fated, short-lived, or absent altogether. Protagonists are untrustworthy or fatally flawed. The facile dichotomy of good and evil is supplanted by a set of self-interested entities, led by personal incentives along convergent or divergent paths. The drama is psychological, emotional, aesthetic, or all of these.

The alienation, violence, trickery and weird sex that I encountered in these books made me leery, at times, of the whole sorry necessity of growing up. If literary novels set out to more closely approximate reality, I wasn’t so sure reality was for me. But although Freud stated that “an ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle,” he lets on that the reality principle “also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed.”*

Gradually, I found the pleasures, and there are many, in more demanding literature, which offers great rewards to readers and is not always so arduous as it seemed when I was fourteen. Well-honed, drum-tight sentences that twang like a bowstring provide more adventuresome reading than many conventional tales of derring-do. And there are no better moments in reading than encountering an idea or feeling one has had, but never really recognized until the moment when it suddenly hums in counterpoint to the written word.

Back to reality?

By the time I entered college, I was primed and ready to take on the knotty questions behind life, literature, and the uniquely human urge to write and read. I majored in Comparative Literature, an interdisciplinary catchall of literary theory, literature in translation, foreign language, and literature and the other arts. I took classes with names like “European Modernism and the World” and “Itineraries of Postmodernism.” I wrote papers, with only a pinch of irony, about hypertext, “the unpresentable,” the death of the author, and the subaltern. I read books that drove me bonkers, like de Chirico’s Hebdomeros, and others, like To the Lighthouse, that blew my mind to pieces and put it back together, better.

After graduation, however, I felt suddenly adrift in a non-academic world where my interests and talents were meaningless, and my intellectual investments in default. My shelves were full of Duras and Dazai, Kafka and Soyinka. But I felt drained and weak-willed. I felt the pull of easy pleasure. I picked up a book, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, about a young WWII nurse who falls through a Scottish circle of stones, travels back in time 200 years, and falls in love with an unusually tall and virile highlander. Yes. Not really Harlequin grade material, but closer to it than, say, Infinite Jest. I quickly fell off the wagon and went back to my old ways. Freud might have called it, returning to the pleasure principle.

The kind of books that thrilled me as a child now operated as a kind of literary security blanket, which I clung to through apartment stress, job hunting, and a breakup. As I read, I worried that I might be regressing emotionally to a pre-pubescent state, and wondered if I was betraying some sort of intellectual obligation to elevated literature. Could rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at age 23 do damage to my brain? As these anxieties grew, I self-medicated: I read more books.

Rose's guilty pleasure

But while easy reading, my substance abuse of choice, shares the pleasures of other good-to-be-bad activities like drugs and overeating, it really doesn’t carry a price. No physical dependencies form, no diseases are transmitted, arteries don’t clog and livers don’t fail. My reading compulsion doesn’t hurt others. And the distinction between pleasure and reality, high-minded literary novels and page-turners, is much more porous than I had allowed myself to see. Just because a book is pleasurable to read doesn’t mean it lacks depth, just as a book that demands extra reader effort doesn’t always deserve it. Books, like people, are all different, and what I read does less to define me than it does the changing moods and circumstances of any life. I’m a person who likes different kinds of books at different times, for different reasons—and that’s okay.

These days, I feel ready to work harder for the returns I get out of good books. After all, some things are more important than quick pleasure. I’ve got a whole list of books I want to read, and I’m excited to tackle the stack. I just need to get through Twilight, and then I’ll get started.

**

[* Freud is quoted from his Introductory Lectures on Psychology, translated by James Strachey]

Rose Garrett is a writer living in San Francisco. She has worked as a barista, literary agency intern, ESL tutor, and caterer at wealthy children’s parties. She currently works as a staff writer and editor at Education.com.

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