adminicle

They walk among us

I finished designing and binding this new book, They Walk Among Us last night. Photos soon.

I'm also working on something called Pheasant Moon, which should print on Tuesday.

Books and reading in future media

A question in the "Collaboration" lecture in the Reith lectures, 2005, asked Lord Broers if he had an idea what the significant developments would be in the first few decades of the 21st century, to which he replied that he was of the opinion that flexible screens and electronic paper would be of importance. The difference in portability and the various ramifications of the changed phenomenology of a computer that behaved in many ways like a book would, one can see, be enormous. My first response was to agree, and to liken the comparison between a bulky laptop computer and a paper thin screen that had some sort of computing power to the difference between a scroll or tablet and a codex.

Codices made the transportation of knowledge possible, in ways scrolls and tablets never really could: certainly they allowed access to information more readily, and the storage and cataloguing became easier. [There is more to say on this subject about the changed phenomenology of the object (the book, the computer)being studied, and its reciprocal effect on the reader, as well as the alterations in what I would call the 'interiority' of the text, by which I mean its powers of becoming a discrete space, accessible in characteristic ways, and 'thinkable-about' in ways characteristic of books]. Codices, along with moveable type are the tools needed to produce the gigantic shifts made possible by the introduction of books to human culture.

While I am unaltered in my agreement that the changes wrought by a true 'electronic book' would be massive, I now wonder what the effect of a networked, open and literally rather than seemingly limitless book would be. One would lose the sense of enclosure, the satisfaction of closure in the works one read. While it's true that it would still be possible to read uninterrupted works, the mere possibility of explicit ruptures, links and shifts in the text at the level of the medium one was reading in, would tend, I think, to militate against the introspection, the meditation, of reading. Books have a sense of privacy, of inviolability. One that is transgressed, of course, in various fictional forms, and one which is certainly an illusion, the meaning of the work and the language it is expressed in being a mere suspension in the larger culture- in this way the borders of the book are actually illusory. But it is a strong illusion, and it is, I think, one of the prime enjoyments of reading that it is, for a while, a private estate of discourse. We know this from the web- reading here is not the same as reading from a book in one's room, on one's own, and in one's own time. Could electronic paper approach this? Or would its very elasticity, its very capacity, bring us into new ways of reading? And what might these new ways of reading be? It is easy to criticise web-surfing for its impatience, its superficiality, its lack of seemly gravitas. It is more difficult to pin down how reading actually takes place, what 'serious' electronic reading (for want of a better phrase) might be about. It is similar to our more familiar notions of reading and the reader, but different, and it takes into account the vertigo of openness that digital reading offers (the reader's exposure, if you will, to borrow a mountaineering term). It has a more widely-spread awareness, to be sure, but it can focus keenly on individual pieces, all the while critically disarming the work in question of any claims to being the last word, always wondering, in fact, if there isn't more to it.

I find myself trying to think about this notion of digital reading in terms of temporary atttention-sets, temporary holdouts against an all-collapsing relativism. It's a struggle to make a meaningful comparison between the iconic figure of the traditional reader, and whatever the image of this new activity might be. To do this I would need a language of what the reader absorbs from the book, and how the reader is in turn absorbed in the book, and I would need to expose these imageries of inside and outside to the effects of the continually shifting boundaries of digital media.

points of reference: novels

a list of possible points of reference to the research outside the usual academic spectrum

w.Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

Jorgé Luis Borges: The Library of Babylon

www.bibliomysteries.com has some links of interest.

also...

snip:

Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life, which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life, which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....snip

programme of work

ideas and notes towards a programme of work

the life of the book

an ideas parking lot. buzzwords and notes for a short essay I want to write.

Circulate/recur/preserve

catalogue/vicinity/serendipity (discrete and not discrete)

review

digitize

handling / physical preservation

travelling (Wesley)

promulgation, multiplicity (media history...printing)

loss- burning, disposing, crumbling, forgetting, collections split

found- secret

opened and closed

collected/enjoyed/hated/abused/reverenced

dreaming/ interiority

editions, relations

1001 nights

mythic/quasi mythic- calvino

world's first inflatable pub!

The world's first inflatable pub. (www.airquee.co.uk)
And people think a new Pope's big news. Perhaps this could be used to bring much-needed relief to publess parts of the world?

today's meeting

I just posted a little voodoopad wiki of my recent meeting with my PhD supers:

link

It seemed the right way to capture it: my notes were really a mindmap style thing, but since the java that runs Freemind, the mindmapping software I use, is such a pain in the arse, I've gone with this instead.

long haul

Holy moly.

I got a surprise from Flickr today. I was bemoaning my losses when Flickr announced their acquisition by Yahoo a while back, in particular the possibility that I had lost money by choosing to update my account just before the announcement. But now they're telling me I'm getting double what I paid for:

"1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 3 year pro account has been doubled to
6 years, and your new expiry date is Oct 1, 2010."

2010. I suppose I'll get used to having it around by then. I wonder how many photos I'll have by that time? 12000 or so? More?

site redesign

screenshot, originally uploaded by aesop.

I've redesigned the front page of my website to make it easier for me to include new material from time to time. It's not a full redesign- many elements are the same, and many pages are unaffected, but it harmonises more with adminicle now. The main point is that I will now be able to include new material in the front page much more easily.

fallen branch

fallen branch, originally uploaded by aesop.

on the path between Queensferry and Cramond.