Knowledge is poptarts

Sometime in the last decade, having three weeks with a library book went from ludicrously long to just enough time. When I was thirteen, I was making weekly trips to the library to check out foot-tall stacks of books. Scratch that first part, actually - when I was thirteen, I was volunteering for the library on a bi-weekly basis helping run their summer reading program. For my girl scout silver award, I spent forty hours scrubbing the sticky residue from years of old due date stickers off the front covers of reinforced hardback children's books. Just me, the Berenstain Bears. and all the tikes at the tiny kids table huffing paint thinner fumes for hours.

The library near where we're living frustrates me with its glamourous high ceilings and self-checkout lanes. The libraries I grew up with in Dallas - underfunded, musty, squat brown buildings from the late sixties, closed Thursdays (the day that every kid is banging out that end-of-week assignment) - were bastions of safety and security for all things old. Old books that no one would ever see stocked on the shelves of the bright, shiny Borders down the street (itself now an antiquated entity on its slow way out, thanks to the even brighter, shinier internet) and old souls. There was a camaraderie amongst the library-dwellers, slow movers in an accelerated world, disinterested in newfangled forms of entertainment and knowledge acquisition, leaving the tiny island of tan, half-decade old computers untouched in favor of getting a sweet spot next to the windows to examine crisp, yellowing pages closer.

The Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library is internet in solid form. At its core are table after table after table of flat screens. Beeps and clicks are more prevalent than the crackle of plastic-encased dust jackets. Bright florescent light bounce off the perfect white walls, creating a mood more like a supermarket than a cavern of centuries of knowledge. Everything is new, fast, instant, all inclusive - everything a book isn't. A monument to modern age intellect and desire - we invented knowledge, you know.

The most telling part is that the old people don't come there. It's all travel coffee muggers in the armchairs. As I confidently navigate the stacks, people are drawn to me to teach them the archaic skill of finding information by hand. I love the internet - I hang out on fucking Reddit and have a unmanageable blog roll - but I respect books. Reading Jezebel might give you a taste of what it's like for victims of sexual assault - it provides the latest talking points, keeps you abreast of legislative developments - but rereading Alice Sebold's Lucky hit me like an earthquake. Food bloggers are hip in their exploration of forgotten foods, but no one tells you the history of your dinner the way M.F.K. Fisher does, beautifully intertwining history and culinary artistry. Books separate the wheat from the chaff, they work harder, they're more passionate, more complete. They've been tested, seen more eyes and more red pen rewrites. The don't win the race, but when has speed ever been the basis of understanding?

There's a scene from The L Word that's always stuck with me, and not because it's the prelude to one of the hottest trysts in the series. Bette, director of a prestigious visual arts center, hires carpenter Candace (who is the first and only person to make overalls sexy) to complete some renovations on the building. They have this exchange about quality right before Candace is hired:

Candace: Have you ever seen this?

[She hands the notebook back to Bette. On a page, she's drawn a triangle. On each side of the triangle, she's written a word: Fast, Good and Cheap.]

Candace: There are three sides to the triangle, see?

[Candace sits down in a chair in front of Bette's desk.]

Bette: Fast, good, cheap.

Candace: Yeah. You can have any two of the three in combination, but you can never have all three together.

Bette: Of course you can. I mean, if you have enough money - (looks at triangle) Oh. Right, then it wouldn't be cheap. Okay.

Candace: You can have fast and good. But that takes a big crew of skilled, highly-paid workers.

Bette: And I can have fast and cheap, but then the end product would probably look like shit.

Candace: You can have cheap and good.

Bette: (smiling) That's the one I want.

Perhaps the top .00001% of written knowledge has been created via the fast, good, expensive route - but this route also requires something even rarer that brings together the primary three qualities: luck. As the media continues to face financial crisis, and as huge hunks of the population (myself included) fancies themselves deserving of being published, having their voice and analysis heard, the world teems with the ability to create fast and cheap. But fast and cheap is only good for profiters - not those who want to consume knowledge. We deserve better than new, fast, cheap. Fast and cheap is pop tarts. You might feel full, but you're really starving.