knight: this is just one of those pieces where. you suddenly remember how arbitrary ostensibly non-arbitrary things are? i’ve spoken about this in the discussion boards but it’s like... wait, we made the alphabet up. it’s not some immutable fact of the universe. which is fascinating, because in turn, when we get to collections--it’s easier to remember that the way we collect speaks more about the values of the collector than of the collection’s intrinsic worth.
trettien: THIS IS SO GOOD ON THE HEELS OF THE KNIGHT PAPER.
“... we might read this move as a deliberate, even protofeminist, media innovation: that is, by applying their domestic skills to “hacking” (cutting, chopping) printed books, the women of Little Gidding carve out a space in which to publish their work in a culture that was otherwise hostile to their participation.”
i spent a bit of time on levi-strauss and derrida’s bricolage last term and thought about it as a means of adaptation: the protagonist of chris abani’s graceland spends his time building western culture into his life in nigeria not just as a livelihood but as a means of self-expression? not only do the little gidding texts apply in the DIY sense of bricolage, and in the collage sense of putting stuff together--but also the almost intertextual nature of what they put together. theophilus as the addressee of luke, but also luke’s preface, and all that--there’s a very pointed reference to be had there, and a certain amount of knowledge needed to parse it
(i actually also think a little bit of the web-weaving trend going around on here. users pick a theme and pop specific texts together. or of blackout poetry/found media)
brylowe: OH hello miranda burgess! (literally cited, very fun.) there’s this... argument to be made, i guess, about prioritizing the constructedness of everything. we think about ideas, or about the actual work of labour, but the paper underneath it seems... always there. it just Is. but in reality, as brylowe calls out, the paper needs to be made: and where that paper comes from is--was--frequently very smart and very cool, but not always savoury. something something spectrality, the secret weird stuff going on in history that makes the surface level social dynamics--like in austen!--possible. there’s a kind of... fantasy of labourlessness that’s at play when we forget about the materials we work with.
senchyne: there’s a PAPERWORK STUDIES??? also speaking of bricolage...
“A single sheet of paper really was composed of thousands of shreds of cloth collected from all over, and possibly from within one’s own community. Thus it is not unimaginable, if a bit fantastical, to entertain the unlikely possibility of one’s own shirt being comingled with the neighbor’s in the paper one read.”
the paper and what is printed on it being presented as both metaphor for society and integral to the continuance thereof... it’s very much “only YOU can stop forest fires” type rhetoric, the way that contributing to the stock of rags is like, a more serious form of patriotism. which of course in turn sparks the more ideological form of patriotism (which is the talking). where brylowe was calling out the way the labour of paper-making is elided, it’s interesting that here it’s highlighted and turned into something Bigger.
garibaldi: this is so--it’s a lot to have going on. i’ve spoken somewhat on the boards about like, the role of representation and the slow ascent into the era of sensitivity readers. the discourse is Fraught for sure, and not in a new way either: watching Black authors themselves figure out how to talk about race and racism to children feels a lot like something that might happen now. and it’s like--we see a lot about reading and papermaking as integral to shaping and putting forward ideas like patriotism, and it kind of hammers home how... if something isn’t Out There then it’s so much more of a pain to get it out there? it’s so much harder to think something when you haven’t got anything to build off of (which is how the little things about plantations apparently passed muster like ???????)
hayles: i’ve made my thoughts known already on the discussion board about embodied reading (!!!) and the work of sorting through text. but all things told, i thought that the “aesthetic of bookishness” was going to be something else. i mean i owned up to this in the judging a book assignment, but i’m not a stranger to the image of being “literary”, leather tomes and all. there’s a weird, hyperspecific clout that i think being “a reader” who “reads for fun” carries (in my circles anyway) especially now that everything’s so digital. it’s something to Choose to Do instead of something that’s just done--too many formats, too many other choices of leisure??? i think to some extent the book might also come to represent--the establishment, i guess. a sanctioned kind of knowledge--an archive of credibility, no matter how inane or ridiculous the actual content it. (i read the hayles before i read the senchyne but this is great with derrida’s paper machine.) i think of julietta singh’s “no archive will restore you” where she kind of talks about the competitiveness of grad school being built on what “archives” you’ve built for yourself--what, exactly, is it that you know? which might be a different kind of bookishness in and of itself.
