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

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

http://twitter.com/matthewbattles
http://mbattles.posterous.com/
http://hilobrow.com

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As author/thespian/media thinker/übertweeter Stephen Fry observes below, books are made of molecules. We didn't used to have any trouble with molecules; in fact we found them quite handy. But today, it's electrons: electrons are the thing. As Fry observes sagely, electrons have practically no weight at all! (It makes one boggle at the future possibility of q-books: books made of quantum particles.) It may strike one as merely a sophisticated bit of trivia about the physical realm, but in fact its practical implications—especially to jet-setting author/thespians—are readily apparent, as Mr Fry elegantly explains.

Commuters on Britain's A4 route near Bath this morning learned that book-molecules can cause them trouble, too. Last night a lorry overturned, spilling 15 tons' worth of books into the roadway. In fact they were all copies of one book: Andrew Marr's Making of Modern Britain, which seems to be selling quite well indeed.

What else makes headlines when a spill of it closes a road? Hazardous materials, surely. Rubber duckies, perhaps, or sex toys. Books indeed remain very special to us.

Here is one clear advantage of e-books: electrons can't spill out of trucks and close roads; no one will ever be crushed by a load of e-books. Of course, electrons can electrocute, but it would take quite a load of e-books to cause even a mild shock.

But there are wrecks, and there are wrecks. In addition to dangerous hardcover volumes, a paperback edition, and e-book versions in every au courant platform, Stephen Fry's memoir, The Fry Chronicles, comes as a smart iPhone app:

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To be or not to believe in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I'ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet, so I'ma keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books...

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In a chapter called "The Deepening Page," Nicholas Carr offers a swift and graceful account of the history of writing. He traces the rise of logic, coherence, and depth from magical formulae scratched on potsherds and wax tablets by the ancients, through the pious allusions of the middle ages to the graceful periodic sentences of the eighteenth century. Their prose represented not only a formal triumph, but a neural one as well. "To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought," writes Carr, "one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object."

The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author's words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

To Carr, the story of manuscript, printing, and publishing is the rise of the "deep page," with modern literature as the apotheosis of literacy. The process a grimy Gutenberg started in the mid fifteenth century culminates in Wallace Stevens, whose poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" glories in the deep page: "The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind / The access of perfection to the page." 

The trouble is, it didn't feel this way to many people going through these changes at various times in the past. Not to to the manuscript bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, who condemned the coarsening presence of printed volumes in libraries devoted to books in manuscript; not to Pope Paul IV, who started the Index of Prohibited Books during the so-called "incunable era" following the advent of moveable type; not to Pope Urban VIII, who tangled with Galileo; not to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope; not to the French monarchy in advance of the Revolution.

The printing press never only produced the kind of deep reading we admire and privilege today. It also produced propaganda and misinformation, penny dreadfuls and comic books offensive to public morality, pornography, self-help books, and much that was generally despised and rejected by polite culture. Any account of the history of "The Gutenberg Era" that lacks these is incomplete—just as any picture of the Internet that privileges LOLcats and 4chan is insufficient. We must consider both—for pornography, misinformation, and sheer foolishness have thrived from the age of incunables to the advent of the Internet. And the deep-reading brain evolved in the midst of it all.

In his report about ROFLCon in the current issue of New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker argues that open culture needs the slipshod, the shifty, and shallow in order to maintain its health.

The more traditional pundits and gurus who talk about the Internet often seem to want to draw strict boundaries between old mass-media culture and the more egalitarian forms taking shape online — and between Internet life and life in the physical world.... Sometimes the pointless-seeming jokes that spring from the Web seem to be calling a bluff and showing a truth: This is what egalitarian cultural production really looks like, this is what having unbounded spaces really entails, this is what anybody-can-be-famous means, this is how the hunger for “moar” gets sated, this is what’s burbling in the hive mind’s id. But the real point is that to pretend otherwise isn’t denying the Internet — it’s denying reality.

Walker references a talk the computer historian Jason Scott gave at the first ROFLCon in 2008 in which he discussed the shallow and seemingly antisocial memes spread by communications networks long before the Internet. Scott discusses electric media going back to the telegraph, but the printing press teemed with the shallow stuff well before the advent of telegraphy. Readers in the 18th century in particular were offered a tantalizing selection of bawdy images and tawdry tales. As the great book historian Robert Darnton has shown, the age of Voltaire and Rousseau was awash in erotica, dirty cartoons, and fancifully libelous tales of the rich and famous.

So where did the deep page come from? Not merely from ignoring the dross—for many alloys exist between poetry and pornography, and at any given moment, it's never entirely clear which is which. Jonathan Swift, writing his "Battle of the Books" in 1704, didn't even bother with the bawdy writers. Swift's satire depicts a war between ancient and modern authors, with the ancients on the side of sweetness and light; it was Descartes and classicist Richard Bentley that drew his ire as much as any grub street hack. Swift and other early modern readers engaged in an encounter with a murky multiplicity of shifting possibilities in print. And it was the multiplicity that produced the deep page—presumably along with the brain circuitry underlying it. 

At the edges of the deep page lie miles of shallow estuaries, stinking, muddy—and teeming with life. Our plastic brains have been navigating their effluents for a very long time.

Part of a series of posts exploring Nick Carr's The Shallows & Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus.

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The people streaming down the escalators joined queues that bent themselves into arcs, forming a great churning spiral of humanity spinning slowly on its axis at the center of the hall. The exhibits themselves had been trampled; coils of crepe and drifts of royal blue fabric caught on the wreckage of shelving and folding chair, of splined plastic and shattered veneer. The spiraling crowd shambled on through the ruins, dragging it with their feet, mixing it into so much particolored flotsam. And in their midst The Gnomon glowered: still erect upon its pedestal, a throbbing core of darkness dragging all towards it. In the spiral’s innermost circle, hands reached out to touch the Gnomon, a wickerwork of arms turning slowly like the spokes of some inexorable wheel. Outward from the Gnomon jetted pullulating ribbons of black as if driven by some nameless wind; they whipped over the heads of the pilgrims, who raised their arms in supplication. The urge to follow was unbearable; I shut my eyes against it, knelt down and touched my forehead to the cool glass beside the escalator. And amid the terrible tolling and the rank odor of compulsion, the lights of the hall began to shut down, one by one; and the fascinating darkness grew until it held illimitable dominion over all.

I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death. I wondered at this for, as my uncle had said the night before, he had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and he had taught me to pronounce Latin properly. He had told me stories about the catacombs and about Napoleon Bonaparte, and he had explained to me the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them; and I was not surprised when he told me that the fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all these intricate questions. Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. Sometimes he used to put me through the responses of the Mass which he had made me learn by heart; and, as I pattered, he used to smile pensively and nod his head, now and then pushing huge pinches of snuff up each nostril alternately. When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip—a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis.

 

His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger.

 

In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidèle, on the point of starting for New Orleans. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along [2] the lower deck until he chanced to come to a placard nigh the captain's office, offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently arrived from the East; quite an original genius in his vocation, as would appear, though wherein his originality consisted was not clearly given; but what purported to be a careful description of his person followed.

Stools, settees, sofas, divans, ottomans; occupying them are clusters of men, old and young, wise and simple; in their hands are cards spotted with diamonds, spades, clubs, hearts; the favorite games are whist, cribbage, and brag. Lounging in arm-chairs or sauntering among the marble-topped tables, amused with the scene, are the comparatively few, who, instead of having hands in the games, for the most part keep their hands in their pockets. These may be the philosophes. But here and there, with a curious expression, one is reading a small sort of handbill of anonymous poetry, rather wordily entitled:—

 

"ODE

ON THE INTIMATIONS

OF

DISTRUST IN MAN,

UNWILLINGLY INFERRED FROM REPEATED REPULSES,

IN DISINTERESTED ENDEAVORS

TO PROCURE HIS

CONFIDENCE."

 

On the floor are many copies, looking as if fluttered down from a balloon. The way they came there was this: A somewhat elderly person, in the quaker dress, [79] had quietly passed through the cabin, and, much in the manner of those railway book-peddlers who precede their proffers of sale by a distribution of puffs, direct or indirect, of the volumes to follow, had, without speaking, handed about the odes, which, for the most part, after a cursory glance, had been disrespectfully tossed aside, as no doubt, the moonstruck production of some wandering rhapsodist.

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In a network of cheap ubiquitous sensors, any given node becomes disposable. At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.

This is the terrifying endpoint that Basen does not reach. When everyone is a journalist, not only do their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people being covered, their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people consuming their work.

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THE VAST MASS of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a " many-faced and fickle traitor," but at least it is a better aim than to be a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life.

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When factory-produced paint was first made available in tubes in the 1840s, it transformed the practices of painters. Previously, paint-making had been part of the artist's craft (a messy task, ideally handled by assistants). Grinding pigments, measuring solvents, and decanting the resulting concoctions into containers (glass vials and pigs' bladders were frequently used). The texture of the artist's work was determined by the need to make paint, but the paints themselves also literally determined the palette, and even to a certain extent, the subject matter, of their works. With the advent of cheap, manufactured tube paints, paint could be a sketching medium; it became easier to carry paints into the field to paint en plein air. Renoir even went so far as to say that without tube paints, the Impressionist movement would never have happened.

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In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky adopts the mode of a police procedural, analyzing the means, motives, and opportunities we have to use our cumulative free time in creative and generous ways. It's a strange move, treating a notional good as the object of criminal activity, but it affords Shirky with a simple structure for his book. 

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In the first chapter of The Shallows, Nick Carr contrasts the curious ennui of his college's computer lab with the sustaining calm of the library stacks: 

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Putting The Shallows into dialogue with Shirky's Cognitive Surplus, the latter book seems like the one with an actual idea. However smartly dressed, Carr's concern about the corrosiveness of media is really a reflex, one that's been twitching ever since Socrates fretted over the dangers of the alphabet. Shirky's idea—that modern life produces a surplus of time, which people have variously spent on gin, television, and now the Internet—is something to sink one's teeth into. Here's his formulation:

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