library ad infinitum

the republic of letters & the storm called progress

mark twain & theory of value

The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as our new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics. In their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful in art; in our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics. When a man invents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and superior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent to him that is worth a fortune; when a man digs up an ancient statue in the Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold coin. We can make something of a guess at a man's character by the style of nose he carries on his face. The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses, and they bear a deal of character about them. —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

murmuration

They rise across the stubble-roughened field
where gleaning garnishes a winter’s shivered toil
to constellate that pewter streak which yields
the merest bitter warmth, the sun’s torn foil
laid low across those dusky, lifting lands;
 
building walls across the clouds’ unfelt abyss,
walls that tower before they break and shred
as silks that falling from some vast height miss
the earth, and missing shun the soil’s clean bed
until they’re torn by unseen helping hands.

This song the snapping selvage of the flock
makes: not the chatter or the strum of quills
but an unbidden order, which lacks
our creeds, our empires, all that our specie wills;
an orison emergent, a means without an end.

—title word via kottke, with thanks to Stan Carey for helping me think through the etymology.

colonizing the sky

The old star maps made by the astronomers of Alexandria & Baghdad show the sky as a congregation of constellations—recognizable clusters of visible stars—that sometimes overlap and otherwise have gaps between them. Those old maps leak like a Haida house. They are full of fictions, full of stories, but the sweet wind of reality blows through the cracks. Neoclassical astronomers replaced the old star maps with others in which every scrap of sky is accounted for and claimed.... Europeans colonized the sky in that sense in the early eighteenth century, long before they had spacecraft.... The map of Canada, on which Ontario can't stop until Manitoba begins, and Manitoba can't stop until Saskatchewan or Hudson's Bay or the Territories begin, is a fiction of that kind: an accountant's dream and not a picture of reality. But that map continues to be used as a tool to change reality....

—Robert Bringhurst, "The Polyhistorical Mind," in The Tree of Meaning (2008).

Bringhurst digs right into something that's been troubling me about both stories and borders—the way they tend to expand to fill the space. Facts want to do this, too—and yet we forget that facts are but facets caught in Indra's glimmering web. I want stories with room to roam in them—as is my feral wont—and frontiers, outlands, and wildernesses not empty of yhe human but figured everywhere by people who are ends and not means.

making impressions

I've featured quite a few typophillic videos on library ad infinitum in the past, and so I'm grateful to have "Letterpress" by Naomie  Ross come along via Ministry of Type. 

We've seen this sort of thing before, I know—and yet a couple of things stand out: Ross' use of floating caption text, and her shifting depth of field in the shot of the finished work at the end, lovingly caressing the undulating poster's blue letters. Taken together, they beautifully exemplify the grace letterforms aspire to on the screen and on paper—and how, although often painted as antagonists, pixel and print can be made to dance with each other.

Paul Revere's Midnite Bus Tour

I've been trying to sort out how to talk about Paul Revere and Sarah Palin since the erstwhile governor of Alaska staked her garbled claim to my city's liberty heritage last week. I've been ambivalent, however—for while I find Palin's politics odious and her bewitching of the media noisome and bizarre, I haven't been impressed by the presumption of historical truth shown by her detractors. But then I went and checked the video of Palin's account, delivered while lined up for cannoli in Boston North End:

He who warned the, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be taking away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells and, um, making sure as he's riding his horse through town! to send those warning shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free.

What a dog's breakfast!

The story of the liberty movement in eastern Massachusetts during the first half of the 1770s is a fraught and complex one; to a troubling extent, the farmers and townsmen who rallied to the warnings of William Dawes and Paul Revere on April 19, 1775 held an ideology much closer to that of the latter-day Tea Party than we might like to admit. The New Englanders weren't interested in forming a new nation so much as defending the political separation they had already achieved in deed—their purposes were not so much the emancipation of the American colonies or even Massachusetts from British taxation as the preservation of their towns' liberties. They wanted to choose their magistrates and administer town business without interference from royal governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—whose policies were informed a moderate take on Enlightenment ideals, which emphasized committment to the guarantee of liberty by the general application of the rule of law rather than by the exercise of local custom, charisma, and whim—a direct ideological ancestor to latter-day American liberalism, with its faith in federal government flowing from the sovereignty of the body politic. 

Palin's mangled version of this story isn't redeemed by noting that her bells and warning shots aren't entirely disassociated from fact. Indeed as a direct consequence of Revere's ride, bells were rung, warning shots were fired—and the effect on the British of the countryside thus raised in alarm against them was electric. And yet in focusing on mere facticity, her detractors miss the more telling misprision, which turns on the question of what she means by "warning." Historians still argue over the nature and extent of Revere's mission and purpose, but he certainly wasn't riding to "warn" the "British." But that's not what Palin means, nor (I'm willing to bet) what she believes. Indeed in her follow-up with the reliably ridiculous Chris Wallace, she put the story of Revere's ride into its traditional, colonists-warnin', British-are-comin' terms. But then she continued with an amplified defense of her warning-the-British conceit, saying his mission was to send the British a message: "to warn the British that were already there that, 'hey, you're not gonna succeed—you're not gonna take American arms." Palin's account of Revere's actions evoke the media-savvy, publicity-hungry posturings of a 21st century political celebrity. In place of a ride to raise town militias and warn Adams and Hancock that they were in danger of arrest, we get the Midnight Ride Bus Tour 1775—a propaganda event, a sound-bite infused ideological carnival. Palin mistakes the complex machinations of the liberty movement for a 21st-century media circus—or more accurately, she mistakes her own actions for a genuine movement, rather than a made-for-reality-TV simulacrum.

 

long before blogging, Flaubert & feuilletonisme were the death of journalism

From 1844 and 1845, the period when Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue became the rage, and their romances were made the salient, because the most successful and paying portions of the paper, political Journalism has declined contemporaneously and apace with serious literature. In fact, the feuilletoniste, the writer of romances and of extravagant sensational tales, the chroniqueur, and the painter of Bohemian revels and demi-monde life, have nearly effaced, not merely the political disquisitionist and party dialectician, but have effaced the philosophers and historians and graver writers and thinkers of France. In a material age, when an apparently strong military Government is deified, and every man, woman, and child in France is desirous to live fast, to enjoy and to accomplish great personal purposes without labour, without toil, without merit, proper training, or fitting aptitudes, the works of Feydeau, the author of ' Fanny,' the writings of Flaubert, the author of ' Madame Bovary,' and of that monstrous book called ' Salammbo,' the writings of Champfleury, of Henry Murger, of Alexandre Dumas, of George Sand, are preferred to the productions of Villemain, of Cousin, of Guusot, of Mignet, of Montalembert, of Ernest Renan, of Jules Simon, and of St. Marc Girardui. The daily Press of France would prefer, and pay higher, even, for some sensational romance, for something written by Ernest Feydeau, Champfleury, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas, Arsene Houssaye, or the late Henry Murger, than for the finest political or literary article written by De Sacy, St . Marc Girardin, or Villemain. It is success and what will pay that is looked to, not learning, or merit, or genius.

gleaming typophilia

Druckertype

Martin Schröder is a letterpress printer in Berlin with an exceedingly elegant blog. In a recent post on the making of a decorated folder, he offers a slideshow that demonstrates how he locked up his type in a striking pattern to produce a playful letterpress effect in the finished product. Schröder blogs in German—but even if you don't read the language, the images give a splendid demonstration of type's gleaming materiality. —via Ministry of Type

docs as gamespace

I've been using Google Docs for several years to do the bulk of my writing work. But not until the last month had I used the collaborative real-time editing feature. And it's awesome. It's insanely fun to work on a piece of writing with someone else over the network—watching their cursor-avatar driven in turn by insight and frustration as it flickers amidst the words. With a chat box open, the juggling act becomes even more uncanny and enjoyable—it's like opening a backchannel on one's own thoughts. As the other writer taps away, I can comment and cheer him along; sometimes, whole blocks of chat text get picked up and pasted into the main doc.

It's striking the extent to which it turns writing into a kind of game. It's like a game of cards, in a way, with each player laying down tricks, matching and blocking, answering and offering, while the hand each player holds—each one's own books, locally-stored documents and images, the immensity of the internet and the dooryard garden of experience—stays hidden. The written document becomes a playing field, a virtual space made of words. And watching the writing unfold is likely to be more illuminating—and entertaining—than reading the finished text.

Playing the game of writing head-to-head in Google Docs, we get a glimpse, perhaps, of what the Glass Bead Game might be all about.

the very rich cuisine of nathan myhrvold

Les_trs_riches_heures_du_duc_d

I've been wandering slack-jawed through the pages of the web site for Modernist Cuisine, Nathan Myhrvold's six-volume, 2,400-page gastronomic omnium gatherum. Publication of the book has been pushed back to Spring 2011 (for a variety of reasons, from the challenges of proofreading and color-correcting such a large work to delays in drop-testing the special double-walled packaging in which Amazon and other retailers will ship the complete set). Written with co-author chefs Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, the work can be fairly said to chart the polymathic Myhrvold's obsession with the science, technology, and craft of cookery. The photography, including spectacularly-produced, artisanally-photoshopped cross-section images (featuring woks, gas ranges, Weber grills, and a host of other gadgets, all sawed in half with industrial cutters by Myhrvold et al.), is reproduced in rich, four-color stochastic printing.

As the title indicates, the inspiration and focus of the work is modernist cuisine, a movement that could be described as "cookfuturist" (pace @tcarmody) in its melding of state-of-the-art engineering and technology with a high regard for culinary craft. But Myhrvold's goals are broader than an exposition of his parochial, if singularly-expressed, devotion to modernist techniques. The work aims to explain the phenomena of food with scientific precision, historical depth, and no small amount of flair. It's eye-popping and even unnerving in its combination of relentless focus, quirky detail, and scholarly breadth. 

My interest, of course, lies not so much with the cookery, but with the book. For it is a book, and only—emphatically—a book; no electronic version is planned (although Myhrvold doesn't rule out a future edition). As Myhrvold explains, the Kindle had not shipped when work on the book began, and e-book technology has been in flux throughout its production. Furthermore, it was felt that no reading machine (iPad included) could do justice to the large, richly-saturated color images that are the book's hallmark. Former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, Myhrvold presents the choice of the codex not as bibliophillic revanchism, but as a purely practical means of presenting his material in the best possible form. 

And yet as a book, this sumptuous work has a swan-song feel to it. Like last year's publication of Jung's Red Book, or Phaidon's phenomenally expensive Moonfire (bound with real moon rocks!), it's a publishing project that seems intent upon ritually wringing every last drop of signification from the medium of print. Commentators are uniformly nonplussed at the book's staggering size and cost—although it's worth pointing out that for a work of this size and production expense, it's quite fairly priced at $625 retail, or $500 when pre-ordered from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Large, complicated works of scholarship frequently reach such pricing levels; the Oxford Companion to the Book, for instance, in a fat two-volume set, lists at $325 (for which I wrote entries for Harvard College Library and Widener Library, by the way, although I didn't get to saw any libraries in half); and the Oxford English Dictionary will set you back just under one thousand dollars (without a single stochastically-printed picture in twenty volumes). 

Unlike those big, multi-generational scholarly projects, Modernist Cuisine is essentially a vanity work--a spectacular, brilliantly-produced vanity work, but a work of vanity nonetheless. Myhrvold and the master craftspeople in his service have poured an overflowing measure of passion, brilliance, and technique into an undeniably beautiful work. I'm reminded of the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, the monumental manuscript book of hours created in the fifteenth century. With 416 pages, including more than one hundred major images and three hundred decorated intitials, it is arguably the great manuscript work of the waning middle ages. Commissioned by John, Duke of Berry, in 1410, it was not finished until 1489—nearly forty years after the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. 

Perhaps this will be the work of the book in the waning days of print: to serve as a platform for the sacrifice of spectacular vanity.

the novel & the habits of the app

Goldgloves

 

Dipping into the archives at the lovely web site of the Paris Review, I came across a 1984 interview with J. G Ballard, in which the great dystopian is asked to describe his "daily working habits":
Every day, five days a week. Longhand now, it’s less tiring than a typewriter. When I’m writing a novel or story I set myself a target of about seven hundred words a day, sometimes a little more. I do a first draft in longhand, then do a very careful longhand revision of the text, then type out the final manuscript. I used to type first and revise in longhand, but I find that modern fiber-tip pens are less effort than a typewriter. Perhaps I ought to try a seventeenth-century quill. I rewrite a great deal, so the word processor sounds like my dream. My neighbor is a BBC videotape editor and he offered to lend me his, but apart from the eye-aching glimmer, I found that the editing functions are terribly laborious.

He describes a lost world.

Twenty years later, Ballard's work habits had not changed. In an 2006 interview with Simon Sellars of Ballardian, the author said that, although quite interested in computers, he was too set in his ways to try them out.

I don’t have a PC. I’m not on the internet and I think that’s a matter of age. I’m nearly 76 now and I think the personal computer and the internet really came in about 10 years ago. And by then I was an old dog and the internet was a new trick. I mean, I still write my novels in longhand and type them out on an old electric typewriter. I don’t have any modern appliances.


Ballard's habits mirror those described by so many twentieth-century novelists: the months of steady effort, the diurnal rituals of attention, the epistolary relationship of manuscript and typewriter.

I do have to wonder how real it all was.

I'm thinking about the several senses of the word habit. There is the sense of practice, but also of compulsion, even addiction. But then there's the kind of habit that's a raiment, a kind of ritual garb. Maybe it's the historical tendency of habits go through a cycle with these senses as stages, from practice to compulsion to costume.

Information Architects' iPad app, Writer, made quite a splash in my corner of Twitter this week.

"Writer has no graphical settings or formatting features," according to ad copy on the app's page. "It avoids all distracting glitz in the user interface and puts all the beauty in the shape of the text." The app also avoids the distractions of auto-correction, spell-check, and toolbars; there's even a "focus mode" that blurs out all but the three lines of text around the cursor (neurological nota bene: the human brain actually comes with this feature pre-installed).

Admittedly, I was rather smitten with Writer at first, although a number of Internet friends found the app's tendentiousness irksome. But the rub, for me, isn't its slightly-smug ad copy or its bespoke font, or the suggestion that it will help solve your writing problems. Toolmakers made such claims throughout the industrial era, after all, and writing tools are tools. "Only the Underwood Golden-Touch Electric gives your hands such skill," goes the copy in a 1957 typewriter ad, "such effortless speed, such print-perfect letters.... It's as though you'd suddenly put on magic gloves!" We can't blame the folks at Information Architects for finding a similarly stylish way to pitch their product.

No, I'm struck instead by the setting in which we come to Writer: the world of the app, which militates against every habit of attention and concentration in which Writer wants to enrobe us. Writer is a raiment-stage habit that celebrates the practice-stage era of novel-writing by engineering a cybernetic set of compulsion-stage reflexes.

But this is not a death-of-the-novel post! It's clear that novel-writing has a lot of energy left in in. Plenty of people have the chops to sustain novel-writing levels of attention, the freedom to write lengthy works, to sequester themselves on islands of concentration. But if there are habits that come with the world of apps, the novels those habits produce will look much different. In the early age of multimedia, James Joyce wrote Ulysses, with each chapter taking on the habits of a different genre of modern prose, from free indirect discourse to vaudeville show to ladies' magazine.

Maybe the next Ulysses will take the shape of a cycle of apps.

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