Book Review: Note Book

Note Bookby Jeff NunokawaPrinceton University Press, 2015Princeton professor Jeff Nunokawa's new book, Note Book, was born of a squiggle of trivia: Facebook, it turns out, has a “Notes” feature, tucked away in one of its drop-down menus, where members can write anything they like. It's probably a holdover from the days when users might have thought there was some kind of difference between public and private online, some echo of a time before Facebook users just compulsively shared everything right on their main page in front of God, Mother, and Country.In any case, back in 2007 Nunokawa started using the Notes section of his Facebook page to post disconnected snippets of thought, random quotations, and rambling word-associations. These posts gained a following, so Nunokawa kept making them, and the following grew. And now, eight years later, there's a book collecting 250 out of the many thousands of Nunokawa's posts.The book's promotional material – and some of the more delusional blurbs on its dust jacket – describe these posts as “essays,” and in an age when the printed-out comedy skits of 20-year-old YouTube stars are likewise billed as “essays,” it's possible the word won't be met with the universal derision it deserves. But it nevertheless deserves that derision. These Facebook posts aren't essays – they're Facebook posts: they're every bit as rambling, disjointed, unpolished, middlebrow, and boring as all other Facebook posts made by anybody trying to be profound. In these posts, Nunokawa half-asses just enough book-learning to wow the Facebook natives, but every single time he delves for depth (at least in these extracts – one blanches in horror at the thought of reading the original archive in its entirety) he makes himself look like a woozy charlatan. Like, for instance, when he begins to expand on a line from Walton's life of John Donne, “But I shall see it reanimated”:

Walton speaks received doctrine here, which, of course, supplies its own comfort and joy, but reading this, I was lifted up by something else for just a second. This something is no doubt rooted in the standard promise of Resurrection canonically tendered here: the routes from that promise to various renaissance, romantic, and modern renovations of a fatigued sense of sight are well marked. Less definitely delineated is what is lost in these translations. And what is lost, precisely, must be lost, because it cannot be defined. This loss is as much cause for celebration as consolation.

There's basic freshman-level rhetorical trickery going on here to cantilever the sentences along, but the sentences themselves don't actually mean anything, and the profundities are all very firmly of the pseudo kind. And even that's a slight improvement over the many, many posts that don't even manage to be pseudo-profound but are instead just plain old online ramblings, as unrewarding as they are self-absorbed:

You wake up in the dead of night, and your Lazy Susan of a Mind stops its slow spin, leaving in front of your consciousness a particular crevice of concern. (I'm having some difficulty assembling the right language to convey my meaning here – bear with me: you remember or have heard tell of those revolving platters [they were made of monkey-pot (least that's how I remember them – but maybe that was a Hawaii thing)], with dishes containing different kinds of food – maybe poi, or some kind of weird-ass polynesian salad or lomi salmon [no spam] – my memory is a little hazy here. I'm thinking these intriguing contraptions were around sometime in the early seventies, maybe, during the heyday of fondue and culottes.) Anyway, I digress …

“My head is frickin' filled with all these excellent points,” he reports at one point, “but no one with the keys to the kingdom pays much attention to what I say.” If only it were so – but instead, there's been plenty of attention paid to this garbled, uneven junk, first a Facebook following and now a Princeton University Press hardcover. If only the one buys the other, the damage might be contained.