I have a fetish for print. I actually enjoy touching paper. Doesn’t it sound like a tale from the realms of magic: The fact that reading a book – inanimate signs on paper – can get you into this internally buzzing, thudding, cavorting state of mind (body)? Read Anaïs Nins Venus-stories out of fumy opium caves or Samuel Delanys autobiography, Motion of Light in Water – those books are more than their label (‘erotic literature’): They’re the opposite of online-porn (where you feel like changing your browser after watching the video). Not less explicit, but that’s not the point – the point is that something remains. The buzzing I felt when I read those books is a metaphor for the difference in print and online. I do read online. But I never leave the tab open. With books, magazines, even with newspapers, the tab can stay open for months. Sometimes I turn my whole, chaotic flat upside down simply because I look for material, things I’ve read. Quite recently I discussed such things with my writers friend Etgar Keret. We sat in a coffeehouse in north Tel Aviv and chatted about a project in which he participated: Miranda Julys We Think Alone, a series of private e-Mails distributed online, by people like Lena Dunham, Kirsten Dunst, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Etgar himself. July claims that radical self-exposure and manicured discretion are powerful and elegant. Given that Etgar verges on such digital experiments and is yet most known for what he wrote in print, I asked him: “Tell me, what’s the thing with books? Will they sustain, say, more than some decades from now?” He looked at me kind of detached and said: “You know, stories always survive.” – “So its not about the medium?”, I kept digging. Etgar, who is born to lose himself in anecdotes, started to tell me the story of his first story. “It was in the army. I wrote it quickly on my computer, in one of those 48-hour-shifts. I waited for the guy to release me, and when he finally came, I said, hey, I have a story here, you wanna read? The guy said no, so I was like okay, fuck off. I printed the page – the story was called ‘Pipes’ –, took a bus to my brother’s house and asked: Can you please read my story and tell me what you think? It was 6 in the morning, my brother’s girlfriend was awake now and pissed, but he said: Okay, I’ll take the dog for a walk and read it on the way. We started walking. Now the thing is that the dog wanted to take a shit, and it was a quite decisive dog. My brother tried reading while the dog was pulling him, jumping forward like a bouncy ball. Luckily my stories are really really short, so just two minutes later my brother had finished reading. He looks at me with huge, shiny eyes saying: It’s amazing. In the meanwhile the dog took a shit, but in the middle of Rothschild Boulevard! My brother asks me: Etgar, you have another copy? I say: sure. So he takes the paper with my story and clears away the shit with it. When he did that, this was the moment I realized – without rationalizing – that I want to be a writer. What my brother taught me there was, that the story is not in the paper. It’s an argument for burning books. I don’t mind burning books after you write them. I don’t mind shitting on a book after you read it. Read a book, read a kindle, read on a Mac, watch a movie. A story can take you somewhere, that place is what counts.” Of course I didn’t – I actually still don’t – wholly agree with Etgar. It’s hard for me to leave behind what I love, even if it’s just reading habits. However I’ll take this online-forum as sort of a chance, a chance to get myself into a preliminary state of buzzing. My default for the next 60 days: Fuck the fetish – cherish the stories.