library ad infinitum

Another beautiful "making-of" video—this one documents the making of The Complex of All These at The Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.

The means by which we make books are changing—they're branching out and speeding up. But at the same time, the production of "slow books" can be depicted with enough speed to turn book-making itself into performance.

—via Ministry of Type

My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. They are my own original expression and I record them at the same time that I deliver them in order to secure protection. Whereas you are authorized to take notes in class thereby creating a derivative work from my lecture, the authorization extends only to making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other use. You are not authorized to record my lectures, to provide your notes to anyone else or to make any commercial use of them without express prior permission from me.

Check out the rest of the document, which paints a remarkable, dystopian vision of the near future in higher education.

Although the Internet's blinding light makes all such problems seem shiny and new, this is an issue with a lengthy history. Unsurprisingly, issues of lecture "piracy" predate the web by hundreds of years, reaching back to the great age of the lecture, the nineteenth century. The legal history of lectures and intellectual property disputes is covered in an article by Australian legal historian Alex Steel (which is cited in the splendid comments thread following on Harry Lewis's post). According to Steel, the earliest case of legal dispute over note-taking is Abernethy v Hutchinson (1825), in which Abernethy, a surgeon and medical lecturer, sued the then-new journal The Lancet over the unauthorized publication of notes taken by one of Abernethy's students. Abernethy charged a fee for his lectures; the founder of The Lancet, Thomas Wakley, had started his journal because he believed that medical knowledge was a public good to be disseminated as widely as possible. 

Out of the Society of the Query conference in Amsterdam, a discussion of "cultural analytics" software, which I suppose could be said to apply the methods of search engines to the understanding and appreciation of meaning, is available as a Google wave. In this video embedded in the wave Jeremy Douglass uses the marvelous "data wall" at Calit2 to explore the oeuvre of painter Mark Rothko. Cultural analytics "turns the paintings into sets of data that can be graphed," Douglass explains, "and turning those graphs into collections of paintings." The results are beautiful, compelling, terrifically exciting to contemplate.

—thanks to @sivavaid for the Wave link.

The Guardian's Alastair Harper offers a paean to the voices of the Great War—the first European war, as has been observed from many perspectives, to have been fought in the public sphere. Many combatants brought a literary education with them to the war—and offered their witness, nuanced and unvarnished, to the home front. "Before 1914, of those who described war, painted it and wrote poetry about it, very few had seen battle themselves," Harper writes. "Now a generation of the literary middle class had, and found it by turns mundane, draining and horrific."

But if the literary accounts of the war in verse and prose helped civilians face the horrors of war, the public sphere in which those accounts circulated could be a medium of bewitching glorification as well. Nothing illustrates the point better than the tale of Arthur Machen and "The Angels of Mons."

Machen was a neo-Romantic author and newspaper columnist who wrote fey tales of enchantment and horror. His books were popular in an Edwardian culture that swirled technology and science with Spiritualism and magic, in which disembodied voices on the radio and flying machines in the air mingled with the dancing of Earth spirits and the chants of the dead. When war broke out, Machen was serving as a columnist for London's Evening News. In the aftermath of the first major engagement of the war—the Battle of Mons, when the British held back a German advance while retreating to the outskirts of Paris—Machen wrote a story for his column called "The Bowmen." In it, he imagines an intervention in the battle by the ghosts of British yeomen who fell at the 15th-century Battle of Agincourt, led down to battle from the clouds by the spirit of St. George.

In Machen's tale, the divine intercession is brought about by a soldier with a bit of literary learning (the very type of bourgeois Tommy identified in Harper's Guardian column). In the heat of battle, as the German horde bears down on the faltering British line, the soldier unaccountably recalls a restaurant plate emblazoned with the motto Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius, invoking the aid of Saint George on England's behalf. "(A)s the Latin scholar uttered his invocation," Machen continues, "he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body—

The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, "Array, array, array!"

His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "St. George! St. George!"

"Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!"

"St. George for merry England!"

"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us."

"Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow."

"Heaven's Knight, aid us!"

And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.

Machen's story appeared in September 1914, barely a month after the battle. By April 1915 it had been reprinted in numerous venues from church newspapers to Spiritualist magazines. Among the most credulous storymongers were parish priests who relayed the tale in sermons and published it in pamphlets and bulletins.

Along the way, it became true. There were reports of other eyewitnesses to the supernatural spectacle and accounts of numerous ghosts, angels, and spirits at the Front. Although Machen released the story in book form with a preface asserting the fictional nature of the tale, versions attesting the tale's veracity continued to circulate. Later, some would suggest that the apparition had been a figment of shell-shocked imaginations of the retreating soldiers; others argued it had been a conspiracy of the War Office, proffering spellbinding propaganda to a credulous public.

After the war, Walter Lippmann famously argued that the circulation of news during the conflict demonstrated that the public sphere could not serve a salutary purpose in society. Stereotypes and parochial perspectives assure that news, opinion, and comment are never better than glorified rumor; the notion that the media offer citizens the information they need to participate in public life is either quixotic or mendacious.

 Lippmann's view became the conventional wisdom, and the tale of the Angels of Mons would seem to illustrate his point. But I'm not so sure. Because after all, wartime readers were exposed not only to glorious visions of righteous intercession, but the bitter testimony of the war poets as well. Not only adsit anglis, but dulce et decorum est.

Like war, the public sphere is messy, agonistic, and uncertain. Better a war of stories and ideas—a trench-fought battle of myths, fables, and bitter witness—than the divine sleep of reason.

I was out for a run this morning, passing through the woods at the edge of Forest Hills Cemetery, when suddenly the wind whipped up. Only it wasn't a wind. Crows, some in the bare trees, others hopping among the leaves, were taking wing at my approach; the flock rolled along like a croaking, curling, breaking wave. Now in its midst, I noticed that squirrels too were caroming among the trees. It didn't feel as though the birds and squirrels were fleeing me, or that we were all fleeing some common threat, like forest critters at the approach of the Tasmanian Devil. Instead, I had the giddy, sentimental-but-serious sensation that I had joined a pack.

We weren't a pack, of course; we were a mere happenstance, a coincidence of corvids and rodents with a single transgressive hominid in their midst. But as these animal sovereignties took their leave of one another, I got to thinking about packs and how they work. Deleuze & Guattari famously write about packs, about "animal collectivities" that are a "mode of becoming," not "filiative regimes of the family or modes of classification... of the State or pre-State type" but spontaneous, emergent collocations of hunger, curiosity, & desire. The pack's prototype in this sense isn't necessarily the wolf pack (which is a family, or at least answers to the familial), but the pack of feral dogs. Like the wolf pack, the dog pack is an animal collective made up of sociable individuals, each with their capacities and drives. The wolf pack has its males and females, its subordinates and dominants, its nephews and daughters and confreres. But the dog pack is even more heterogenous. The structure of the pack is an emergent property of this interwoven individuality. The pack qua pack is almost eiphenomenal. Pack members aren't "packing" in any formal sense; there's no pack compact, no manifesto. They're all "following their bliss," chasing food or amusement or one another; being a pack, meanwhile, is the pack's job, is what the pack does.

My friend and collaborator Josh Glenn has written about the Argonaut Folly as a type of creative collectivity over and against the troupe, the team, the commune... think not only of Jason and his shipmates, but the James gang, the Justice League, John Smith & the Jamestown settlers. A band of rivralrous misfits, thrown together peradventure, with big schemes & sometimes-conflicting dreams. But Josh observes that "a wised-up reading of the Argonautica of Apollonius suggests that Jason’s crew of ultra-talented specialists was less a ship of heroes than a Narrenschiff, a ship of fools. Or rather: a ship of heroes is always already a ship of fools." There's something tragic and absurd about argonauts, who are misfits anywhere but on the frontier, beyond the bounds of the community. And their adventure is always doomed to failure. The pack is different. It's spontaneous, emergent, always becoming; it has no past and no future; it's beyond disappointment.

What's this pack business got to do with the library ad infinitum? On my run it struck me that the sensation I felt amid the thronging crows was a familiar one—I taste it in the kind of work I do on the web. I'm running hungry, watching for the flick of ear and the flash of tooth that signals a confrere on the trail of something worth pursuing. We keep finding ourselves in packs. I want to think that the pack—not as a replacement of traditional publishing or reading or study but something always already outside and alongside it—is a creative collective to conjure with. The pack may produce experiences of beauty and value—but emergently, spontaneously, even accidentally.

I've already posted about John Carrera's Pictorial Webster's; since then, I've been reading Hugh Kenner's The Mechanic Muse, in which the Linotype—Carrera's legacy typesetting machine—figures prominently (thanks to Tim Carmody for setting me on the path to that book). And it's making me reflect on the remarkable spectacle of the dictionary's production, and what it might have to say about nostalgia, the late age of print, and hope for the book.

Linotype, a machine contemporary to the original Webster’s Pictorial, straddles the ways of the engineer and the bricoleur. In The Mechanic Muse, Kenner writes evocatively of the Linotype and its impact on modernist literature, which is of a piece with the role of technology in machine-age culture. Kenner describes how the keyboard of the Linotype was arranged to offer the greatest efficiency not to the operator, but to the machine. Frequently-used letters were grouped on the left side of the keyboard, under the operator’s weakest fingers, because it gave the Linotype mechanism a shorter distance to travel with them. Kenner guesses that Linotype operators didn’t know why the keyboard was set up this way, but I think he’s likely wrong: press workers then knew the ins and outs of their machines in a way that’s quite foreign to us in the post-machine age, in which we’ve become fluent herders and conductors of black boxes. Do many keyboard users today beyond a lettristic few know why their keyboards say QWERTY? And yet we use those keyboard to mobilize great streams and blocks of information, and to create objects of great beauty as well—some of them made of matrices of letters.

In its time the Linotype was a marvel of technology, not a thing of craft but of manufacturing. Kenner notes that through its agency, twentieth century publishers turned text into “reading matter,” books into consumer products. Whenever we wax nostalgic for those books of the high machine age, we should remember that they were the fruit of technologies that in their time could be as alienating as any today. And yet under right and knowing hands, the spirit of craft may be awakened afresh. Carrera has done what Borges’s Pierre Menard tries to do with the Quixote, striving to exactly reproduce a book from another era from the wellsprings of a consciousness formed by his own time—only with the Pictorial Webster’s this is a consciousness expressed in hands and things.

McSweeney's much-anticipated newspaper edition, the San Francisco Panorama, is available for preorder.

The purpose of the project all along has been to advance a "21st-century newspaper prototype. Featuring 380 pages of content, lush, four-color printing, and writing and art from the likes of William T. Vollmann, Michael Chabon, Stephen King, and Art Spiegelman, and a price of sixteen dollars, it makes clear the McSweeney's prescription for saving the news: become fabulous. It looks like a great read, but hard to scale for the likes of the Podunk Register. And will one arrive the next day, and the next day, and the next?

I want a copy. But as for saving the newspaper, it looks less like a reboot than a swan song, an apotheosis.

With the news that Claude Lévi-Strauss died three days ago at the age of 100, I've been following a minor detail down the rabbit hole of translation and primitive categories. As is often remarked, the title of Lévi-Strauss's most famous book, The Savage Mind, is a bit funny in the original French: La Pensée Sauvage, which also may be translated as "The Wild Pansy." We might chalk this up to the fuzziness of cognates in translation, but there is more at work. As Lévi-Strauss knew, there is an traditional, likely ancient folk association between pansies and thought. After Hamlet's driven Ophelia away, she appears before Laertes mumbling strains from an old ballad (Act IV, Scene 5):

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts."

The French edition of Savage Mind included a discussion of the symbolic interpretations made of the wild pansy (known to us as the violet) in European folk life, and it's said that Lévi-Strauss suggested using the phrase "Pansies for Thoughts" as the title for his book in English. Shakespeare's plays are dotted with such evocations of the folk wisdom of flowers, which have been held up as proof of the Bard's humble origins; a Francis Bacon or an Earl of Oxford might have known the classical names of plants, but the peasants' categories would have been beyond his mien.

The meanings of flowers are documented at great length in Victorian "floriographies," or flower languages, which elaborate the passions, attributes, and states of mind symbolized by dozens of varieties of wild and cultivated trees, shrubs, and herbs. The Ash Tree represents Grandeur, or Prudence; the Bee Orchis, Industry; the Chickweed, Rendezvous. One could compose a message to one's beloved in the form of a bouquet—although by the time the dear one would have decoded the terms, the posie would have withered away.

The floriographies all include a flower that arouses the curiosity of someone looking into traces of reading and writing throughout the culture: a flower called the Abecedary, symbolizing Volubility.

The (far more common) non-floral use of the word abecedary is in connection with alphabets written out or printed and illustrated for children, a usage which dates back to the Middle Ages, and covers alphabets reproduced on hornbooks and school slates and carved into headstones. The floral meaning of abecedary isn't documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, even though it's in alI the floriography volumes—at least the ones I've checked thus far in Google Books, including the most famous one illustrated by Kate Greenaway (published in 1885; alas Kate made no illustration of the abecedary flower). The fullest explanation appears in The Language of Flowers (1835):

Volubility, Abecedary. This plant is a native of the island of Fernalus; when you chew its head, or roots, the tongue feels a stimulating sensation, that gives it a singular fluency. This plant is employed in looseing children's tongues, whence comes its name abecedary, or children's grass.

A flower that gives a singular fluency: that's one for my garden, to bloom between the poppies and the morning glories. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to exist. It's as though in a Structuralist move the Victorian floriographers had identified a missing node in the paradigm of the flowers, pertaining to the quality of comprehensive and compulsive loquacity—and answered it with a postulated blossom named (naturally enough) for the alphabet.

Memes are things that go viral, right? And their native habitat is the web, right?

Feast your eyes on some bibliomachy: John Carrera of the Quercus Press in Waltham, Massachusetts—and a host of friends—build a fresh edition of the classic Webster's Pictorial Dictionary.

It's moving to watch the book embodied in this way—and staggering to realize that these crafts, exhibited here by artisans of such painstakingly high caliber, once were practiced at industrial scale.

<p>Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.</p>

—via Patrick James at GOOD.