book cultures
>An act of self-reflection
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Thyrza Nichols Goodeve considers the history and shape of the artists’ book @ Spike Magazine.
In the beginning, yes, let us agree: The book is and was and will be, even though, according to book historian Frederick G. Kilgour, we are now in the “Fourth Evolution” of the book – electronic publication. Here, our experience of “the book” as we have known it as a physical object is undergoing a major transformation, one that whispers in the ear of any artist’s book even if the artist’s project is ostensibly about something else. For instance, Tatana Kellner’s71125: 50 Years of Silence (1992) is not about the metaphysics of the book the way Buzz Spector’s books are. It is about her mother’s fifty years of silence in regards to her imprisonment in a German concentration camp during World War II. But in order to “write” this book, she could not limit herself only to conventional pages of text and image but had to go
beyond the book. Her intent was not to write the story into public consciousness but to embody the experience of dehumanization and fragmentation of the camp by incorporating a three-dimensional reproduction of her mother’s tattooed “71125” forearm inside the pages as a die cut – as the core or “spine” of the book through which the reader reads her story.
“In formal terms, the book is comprised of printed pages which have been die cut to accommodate a sculptural element – a life-size cast of an elderly woman’s arm… The arm sculpture lies on the inside back cover of the book so that it remains the center of the reading experience. Because the pages are die cut through- out the arm never goes away, and as the pages diminish, its dimensionality is increasingly apparent.”
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| Thyrza Nichols Goodeve on Amazon |
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Kellner transforms the book while using its basic format and as Joanna Drucker states, The transformed book is an intervention.
>Awkwardness is an essential condition
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Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a culture that doesn’t quite exist. As with the other essays adapted from blogs and published by Zero Books (Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, and Dominic Fox’s Cold World, among others), Awkwardness, in a different America, would supplant the dumbed-down pop and self-help schlock atop the nonfiction best-seller lists. Kotsko’s greatest achievement might be this slim volume’s readability; Awkwardness is written for the large audience that will never read it rather than the small one that will and the book is better off for it.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s idea of boredom, Kotsko argues that awkwardness is an essential condition, the emotional mood of being forced to share the world with people different from us. If boredom is connected to our inevitable anxiety of death, as Heidegger claims, then the equally existential condition of togetherness would have its own mood, one able to transcend even the deepest social divisions. Although his premise is universal, Kotsko focuses on awkwardness in contemporary western entertainment, including the British and American versions of The Office, the extended oeuvre of Judd Apatow, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, all in an engaging 89 pages. Yet despite containing more well-written sentences in its less than 100 pages than a stack of academic texts,Awkwardness trips at the conclusion, finding false redemption in the greasing of the post-Fordist gears.
>An intimate new friend in the house of books
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| Sarah Moon @ Lens Culture/ |
Keri Walsh remembers the influence of Adrienne Monnier on the life of literary Paris @ Brick.
Sylvia Beach said that she had three loves: Shakespeare and Company, James Joyce, and Adrienne Monnier. For mysterious reasons—perhaps because she wrote in French, perhaps because in the age of high modernism she preserved the habits and demeanour of the nineteenth century—Monnier was passed over for the international fame that went instead to the women she inspired: women such as Beach, Gisèle Freund, and Janet Flanner. Monnier was, in the self-assured title she chose for her advertisements, Directrice of her French-language bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres. To the writers who gathered there, including Paul Valéry, André Gide, James Joyce, and Valery Larbaud, Monnier’s bookstore on the Left Bank was the heart of literary Paris. Without her example, Beach’s Shakespeare and Company would never have existed. Monnier taught her how to run a business, how to deal with French bureaucracy, how to manage cantankerous people. Beach never made an important decision without first consulting her.
Monnier’s emergence as a force in French letters was in some ways as remarkable as Rimbaud’s four decades earlier. She had no connections, no serious university credentials—only a mother who encouraged her to read and a father who entrusted her with a small settlement won after an accident, which was just enough capital to start her business in 1916. Three years later, Sylvia turned up on Adrienne’s doorstep in quest of an education in modern French verse:
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One day at the Bibliothèque Nationale, I noticed that one of the reviews—Paul Fort’sVers et Prose, I think it was—could be purchased at A. Monnier’s bookshop, 7 rue de l’Odéon, Paris VI. I had not heard the name before, nor was the Odéon quarter familiar to me, but suddenly something drew me irresistibly to the spot where such important things in my life were to happen.
>To live is to feel powerless and to be angry about it
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reviews Jose Saramago’s last essays @ Quarterly Conversation.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In September of 2008, at the age of eighty-five, Jose Saramago began to write a blog. His wife, watching him suffer the restlessness and anxiety of advanced age, had suggested to him that he try doing something challenging, as his traveling and own writing were slowing down. Unlike so many writers who viewed the approaching age of the Internet as threatening, Saramago wrote: “Could it be, to put it more clearly, that it’s here (on the Internet) that we most closely resemble one another? Are we more companionable when we write on the Internet? I have no answers. I’m merely asking the questions. And I enjoy writing here now. I don’t know whether it’s more democratic, I only know that I feel just the same as the young man with the wild hair and round-rimmed glasses, in his early twenties, who was asking the large questions. For a blog no doubt.”
Saramago viewed blogging as a new collectivism, egalitarian by its very nature. This kind of sentiment was not unusual for Saramago, as his work comes from a broad range of issues about power, social status, and social organization. “The one from and into which all others flow is the question of power,” he once wrote, “and the theoretical and practical problem we are presented with is identifying who holds it, discovering how they attained it, checking what use they make of it, and by what means and for what end.” The phenomenon of the Internet was, for Saramago, a necessary cleansing of the power structures inherent in print and other media, and reading this collection of essays (most of which are raw, urgent, and fragmentary) it seemed that the Nobel Prize winner wished to be a member of the clamorous cyber population, not a distant, superior observer from the upper ranks and echelons of literature and ideas. For him, blogging was a form of citizenship and a means, perhaps, that might engender a new moral conscience, fostering meaningful (albeit sometimes irrational and strident), global dialogues.
>There is always going to be a book that saves you
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Alexander Chee on finding your way in the dark with digital books @ The Morning News.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When I recently moved to New York to live with my partner, Dustin, I introduced 22 boxes of books to the one-bedroom railroad apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he’s lived for 19 years. Dustin built over 70 feet of bookshelves for me and in just one day I filled them, feeling, afterward, mixed pride and shame at the size of my collection. Which still didn’t quite fit on the shelves.
Dustin built one more shelf. And another. I filled these also. Now all of the books are off the floor and out of boxes, and the shelves he built fit beautifully into the room. The books do not overwhelm, but this is because they are all on shelves. There’s really no extra space, which is to say, any new books mean that soon the books may overwhelm us. Three, or perhaps 10 new books, much less the 30 I can easily acquire per season, could take us into crisis.
My books have moved with me from Maine to Connecticut to San Francisco to New York, to Iowa to New York to Los Angeles to Rochester to Amherst and now to New York once again. I’m a writer, also the child of two people who were each the ones in their family to leave and move far away, and the result is a life where I’ve moved regularly, and paid to ship most of my books so often I’m sure I’ve essentially repurchased them several times over. Each time I move, my books have grown in number. Collectively, they’re the autobiography of my reading life. Each time I pack and unpack them, I see The Phoenicians, a picture history book my father gave me as a child, and will never sell; the collection of Gordon Merrick paperbacks I shoplifted when I was a closeted teenager, stealing books no one would ever let me buy. The pages still retain the heat of that need, as does my copy of Joy Williams’s Breaking and Entering, bought when I was a star-struck college student at the Bennington Summer Writers’ Workshop 20 years ago. Each time they were all necessary, all differently necessary.
>The allure of the burning library
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects — the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives — is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.
There was a time when I thought I could do without much of one. As a student in college and graduate school, moving from room to room virtually every year, the desire to keep my possessions down to what could be stuffed into a Toyota Corolla overwhelmed the reptilian instinct to collect. That in itself became a pleasurable asceticism, and it suited my budget. As so often accompanies renunciation, I came to love the forbidden objects — the books — more and more. I learned to bind and sew my own, to cut the pages, and to print, illustrate, and letterpress them. Exactly because space was so limited, I could spend an entire Sunday afternoon at a certain used bookstore agonizing over several possible purchases, of which I would allow myself only one.
Mainly, during that time, my bookshelf was a rotating amalgam of whatever my heart desired from the library — and these were really good university libraries, with miles of shelves and easy access to interlibrary loan. On a whim, I could flit to the cavernous stacks and pick up an answer to whatever curiosity crossed my mind. Along the way to finding it, I’d end up grabbing a few more books that attracted me. Those ugly buildings — they were always ugly — became more than homes away from home. Walking into one, I’d feel as if entering an annex of my own nervous system.
>A faithful pursuit of an abstract essence
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I am, like you, a rabid reader of good books.
There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve.
Reading requires conviction. I try to find a spark that sets my brain ablaze. I fail, mostly.
A few weeks ago my energy had waned. I needed a shot in the arm, a book that would affirm my effort and push me forth. Good books lead to a good life. That is what I needed to hear, again. I yearned to feel the swell, again.
I turned to David Ulin, no stranger to the slog. The title of his new book, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, provoked me. By reading it I hoped to regain my mojo. Ulin, a book critic by trade, is like me a lover of literature, but the advent of digital culture, he says, has affected all of us in a particular way: Close reading has become difficult.
Ulin’s teenaged son Noah thinks books are dead. He is reading The Great Gatsby and isn’t jazzed about it. Ulin, understandably, is concerned for both himself and his kin. He laments the loss of silence in our lives. I understand. There are days when I dream of a chair in an otherwise empty room. Some of the best moments of my life have been spent alone.
>One night in my dreams I meet the devil
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| Sam Falls @ Guernica |
Hilary Mantel on reading and recovery @ London Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Three or four nights after surgery – when, in the words of the staff, I have ‘mobilised’ – I come out of the bathroom and spot a circus strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think, actually shouting at myself, but silently. This is a no-smoking hospital. It is impossible this man would be allowed in, to behave as he does. Therefore he’s not real, and if he’s not real I can take his space. As I get into bed beside him, the strongman vanishes. I pick up my diary and record him: was there, isn’t any more.
This happened in early July. I had surgery on the first of the month, and was scheduled to stay in hospital for about nine days. The last thing the surgeon said to me, on the afternoon of the procedure: ‘For you, this is a big thing, but remember, to us it is routine.’ But when I woke up, many hours later, he was standing at the end of the trolley in the recovery room, grey and shrunken as if a decade had passed. He had expected to be home for dinner. And now look!
Hospital talk is short and exclamatory. Oops! Careful! Nice and slow! Oh dear! Did that hurt? But the night after the surgery, I felt no pain. Flighted by morphine, I thought that my bed had grown as wide as the world, and throughout the short hours of darkness I made up stories. I seemed to solve, that night, problems that had bedevilled me for years. Take just one example: the unwritten story called ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. I had seen it all, years ago: the date and place, the gunman, the bedroom behind him, the window, the light, the angle of the shot. But my problem had always been, how did the ArmaLite get in the wardrobe?
>Censorship and samizdat depend on each other
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Béla Nóvé retraces the debates about censorship in Hungary in the 1980s, and the echoes of those ideas today @ Eurozine.
“The Russian word samizdat literally means self-publishing. It is meaningless in a world without censorship. But in countries where the government retains the right to control the publication of books, periodicals and articles, anything that is published and distributed without the censor’s stamp is samizdat. Censorship and samizdat depend on each other: while censorship exists, uncensored writing will always be circulated.” So wrote Ferenc Köszeg, founding editor of Beszélö (Talker), the most influential Hungarian samizdat periodical launched in late-1981.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What I aim to do here is to provide a brief historical overview and an analysis of some of the passionate debates on censorship in Hungary during the 1980s. It was a hot topic in the dying years of the communist regime under Gorbachev, and remains widely debated today as an inherent part of the moral, political and intellectual heritage of the Hungarian democratic movement. Some of the samizdat written then has the capacity to stir people to action even now: A cenzúra esztétikája (The Aesthetics of Censorship) by a young journalist, Miklós Haraszti, has recently become popular in its Chinese translation among students and intellectuals in China.
>Tempting himself with the impossible
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Morgan Meis @ The Smart Set on the romanticism of Mario Vargas Llosa.
The old man has always been a Romantic. It is easy to picture him there in the military boarding school in Lima, 1950. He describes it to us in four words; damp, gray, boring, unhappy. That was Mario Vargas Llosa 60 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In the face of the doldrums, Llosa turned to Victor Hugo. Who else is a sensitive young lad living in Peru going to turn to? I say this jokingly, but also, not. In a curious and enjoyable little book Llosa wrote about Hugo’s Les Misérables (The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and “Les Misérables”), he describes being carried away by Hugo’s world of “extreme misfortune, love, courage, happiness, and vile deeds.”
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