Read Only

This page is about reading: books, spaces, changes; publication, digitisation, representation.

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gut words

Photograph: Moyra Davey, postal correspondance, 2015. 

– from ‘Love, Freedom, Honesty, Solidarity, Democracy, Totalitarianism’, by Contemporary Russian poet Kirill Medvedev. It’s No Good is published this week by Fitzcarraldo Editions. 

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"On a paper tablecloth in an emptied restaurant lies a cream page with grey rules, no text. A slight body studies horizontal lines, without a word to write."

Part of The sentence that idles, for Slow Art Day 2013 at the SLG, London. 

Agnes Martin, On a Clear Day, 1973, from a series of 30 square screenprints.

Jennifer Egan, plan for 'Black Box' (2012), a story for twitter in 140 characters. 

Carsten Nicolai, Grid Index, 2009.

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Connected by Green Lines

Sol LeWitt's All Ifs Ands or Buts Connected by Green Lines (1973), recently viewed at Museum MADRE, Napoli.

Augmented Textuality, a graphic overlay that visually links key concepts in a text, as experimented by @cavvia on Rem Koolhaas's Junkspace essay. 

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"Silent receptacles of countless millions of words"

For lovers of media, dead and alive, an extract from Dickens's Household Words 'Valentine's Day at the Post-Office'. He tells of mail-system labyrinths in lavish prose, "whole flocks" of envelopes awaiting slaughter: 

"An acute postman might guess the tenour of their [the letters'] contents by their covers:- business letters are in big envelopes, official letters in long ones, and lawyers' letters in none at all; the tinted and lace-bordered mean Valentines, the black-bordered tell of grief, and the radiant with white enamel announce marriage."

Such letters come decorated with "hymen embowered in hot-pressed embossing" and "nymphs in very opaque muslin". This heyday of the Post Office saw, "187 tons of paper and print pass up and down the ingenuous 'lift' every week." This made for a "Niagara of language", a veritable flood of words. 

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"I wrote this book on two microcomputers, the notebook portable Tandy 100 and a desktop IBM-compatible, the Tandy 1000. The main desktop software used for the first half of the book was a combination of Framework and Word Perfect 4.1; for the second half, I used XyWrite III in conjunction with Borland's Lightning. On the Model 100, the Ultimate Rom II ran along with Larry Groebe's THINK."

Michael Heim, Electric Language, A Philosophical Study of Word Processing.

#retrosoftware

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The Writer and the Professor

Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979), 16.40.

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The ideal for a book would be to lay everything out on a plane of exteriority of this kind, on a single page, the same sheet: lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.

Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux (before www.)

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Book (n)

This was entry written for the London Consortium Dictionary, An Indefinite Record of the English Language, designed and produced by Lina Hakim, images and pdf here. 

Book, n

A written object designed for reading. 

The book finds its etymological roots in the beech tree - from the Germanic 'bokiz' or 'Buche' - on which texts are thought to have been first inscribed.

In modern times, a 'book' was synonymous with the Latin codex ('block of wood') - a bound tome of separate leaves. Bookworms are known to furrow deep into the book's wood. 

Now, the book becomes less a material, than a conceptual entity. A container for thought, a binding of the world. A perceived enclosure whose written contents extend always outside. A portable, interactive network; an interface with ideas.   

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Reading Entrances II: Paratexts

Edmond Jabès' The Book of Margins, title page. 

How does the reader’s particular passage from outside world to the interior of the text lead to a state of engagement? If reading involves a crossing from the lived space in which the reading is taking place to the expansive realms of imagined spaces conjured by the text, then this crossing is mediated by the surface with which we engage with the text, be this a book, a page or a screen. How does the form of this entrance, dependent on the text’s material support and spatial disposition, shape the reader’s engagement with the text’s contents, providing a gateway onto a transportative experience?

~

One way in which the reader is lead into the text is by the paratext, Gérard Genette’s term, which is important for the idea of a structural layout to textual engagement. The paratext is a threshold “between inside and outside”, writes Genette in Seuils: “the fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading”. The paratext provides the framework for the written text, and consists of all textual information surrounding the text that is not the text itself: titles, prefaces, footnotes, captions, and so on. The paratext also extends to the author commentaries, correspondences, and public reviews and responses to the book - this is what Genette goes on to call the 'epitext'. The book's paratexts are examples of the codes and conventions that govern the form of the book and the reader’s movement through this.

These conventions evolved from the early codex, through the scholastic practices of the twelve to fourteenth centuries, in order to provide the space for scholars’ notes and to assist readers' navigation [1]. So where today, we are quick to point out the flexibility of non-linear paths through hypertext, the codex itself was hailed as a form which would allow the reader easy access to any part of the text.

The Book of Margins, contents page. "Page without Date, Undatable; First step; Intimate Distance".

Contemporary paratexts may not require a physical thumbing through pages, but they still present a surrounding environment in which the main text may be read. When we read online, we encounter post-text comments, sidebar texts, tags. When we read on an e-reader, we may see our own annotations, or those of others, overlaid onto the main text. On a Kindle, once you've finished your book, you are invited to tweet, share or rate it. The intrusions of adverts are not however an extension of the paratext - for this extra-textual surround does not mediate between reader, author and reading format, but interrupts that mediation. 

The notable shift is that these are paratexts that we as the reader can build on and interact with. The comments and marginalia that we may have always scribbled on books are brought into the public domain - look, for example, at the kind of close discussions that went on around Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in a (now-quite-old) digital annotation project initiated by if:Book. 

A new proximity of relations between authors and readers is instigated. Authors may comment beneath their own articles or reviews, in dialogue with their readers.  This comments section after a piece in The Guardian on Lars Iyer's first novel, Spurious (which began, lo, as a blog) is a happy example of the extended epi-text: the author responds to the journalist, readers respond to the author, an ex-student of Iyer even turns up to give his opinion. A textual dialogue beyond the book is initiated, which expands into the outward links of the internet. Not all readers desire to reach beyond the book's container in such a way, "The book, sui generis, is enough" (Iyer), but the space for written conversations is opened up by these new paratextual domains. 

There is also now the potential for the feedback of reading data. Author of City P. D. Smith recently commented on Twitter:

A new experience for me as an author: notes & quotes from my book shared by #Kindle. 

Somewhat more sinisterly, this piece, 'Your E-Book is Reading You', discusses the implications of how publishers can receive data on how people are reading: how fast you read an e-book, whether you finish it, and if you don't, at what point you abandon reading; which other titles you subsequently buy and, again, the common annotations and highlights. "We call this the creative intelligence of all the people reading Kindle", says a spokesperson from Amazon. But the management of writing and book production based on analytics seems contrary to the creative imagination of literature; as an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux puts it: "We're not going to shorten War and Peace just because someone didn't finish it." This isn't so much about paratext, but paradata: the book produces a wealth of informatics as it is published, acquired and read.

It goes its way

Contemporary paratexts return the text  (from texere, to weave) to its etymological netting, to its place amidst a ‘web’, where words are akin to crossed and overlapping threads. If the book's paratexts evolved out of a particular material form, the simple transference of old cues and conventions to new means of presentation and transmission is mistaken [2]. As novel doors for textual exploration are presented, the features of form and messages of the paratext must just as sophisticatedly evolve, shaping the diverting paths of twenty-first century readers. 

Next time I'll look back to the elaborate entryways and textual preliminaries of the early printed book, to consider how readers in the first centuries of printing were guided into a space of contemplation. 

[1] Johanna Drucker, ‘ The Book Arts & Book-building Web’, www.philobiblon.com/drucker/.]

[2] See designer and future-of-the-book commentator, Craig Mod's notes on the use of 'lazy metaphor' in e-book design - the tendency to employ familiar conventions like page corners and parchment colour in digital texts. 

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Reading Entrances I: Thresholds

The entrance corridor into a Khmer temple, Cambodia. Photo courtesy of Denise Riley.

What is going on behind this door?

A book is shedding its leaves.

- Edmond Jabès, ‘At the Threshold of the Text’, The Book of Questions.

This is the first in a series of fragments drawn from my research into reading undertaken at The London Consortium last year, which formed my dissertation: 'Reading Entrances: Crossing the Thresholds of the Book'.

This research was to do with how we enter texts: how cues and conventions of the book's form guide readers; how the materiality of the codex acts as a textual support;  and what we can learn about the interior space of reading, from the interior space of the book. 

~

Reading occurs, it will emerge, at the threshold. The threshold is a place of perpetual movement or transition. The word 'threshold' signals three things:

the material form of an entrance, a doorway or step

 the place or point of beginning

the point beyond which a given effect is produced (or, a state which is poised between these last two).

The process of reading involves the crossing of all three kinds of threshold. The book's cover and first paratextual pages,* present, I will suggest, a kind of doorway, gateway or corridor onto the main body of text. The threshold of the text marks the point of our engagement, the incisive mark that opens up our mind to wide worlds of words. 

The threshold is a portal through which the visitor ends up inside rather than out, and upon which they are invited to pause before becoming absorbed. If the nature and details of the architectural threshold provide a particular greeting to the visitor, the form of archi- text-ural entrance also welcomes the reader, bringing him or her into the space of the text. 

The idea of the textual threshold calls upon a feature of architectural space: the built boundary line that throughout human history has been instilled with codes and rites, imbued with sacred significance. In Latin, limen refers to a threshold as a point just out of reach, whereas the Greeks use limen to signify a haven, a refuge. The Greek house was governed by a set of thresholds, physical boundaries of spatial areas, which also demarcated the social boundaries of what one was allowed to do where.

Gérard Genette, quoting Duchet, writes that the threshold of the text is:

Where two sets of codes are blended: the social code... and the codes producing or reglating the text.

In the material book, codes and conventions regulate the way in which the reader enters the text - if they choose to enter and engage with it in a traditional way, in a progression from front to back cover. The form of the textual threshold must support the weight of every reader's crossing, guiding him or her within.

This is Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought:

The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in is joined in the between's dependability.

Over time, the thresholds of the material book have established such an aspect of dependability: the support of the cover, the spine, pages to leaf through, these support readers' interactions with the text.  The thresholds of the text ensure the reader's transition into its inside. 

*Next time I'll think about the formal features of the textual threshold in terms of Genette's concept of the paratext, to think about how contemporary paratexts are evolving.

Can we uncover an underlying structural layout to the process of readerly engagement?

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The Most Beautiful Swiss [Sugar Packets] 2012

New titles from Editions Macula, including Aby Warburg, Le Rituel du Serpent

Last year I wrote about the Most Beautiful Swiss Books from Paris. This year, they are displayed at Zurich's Helmhaus. I visited, and of course - the books were beautiful. But before I reached the display tables, I was stopped at the sight of the museum's posters, the café's sugar packets, the hand wipes, even - all examples of gut design.  

Die Bücher:

Poemotion / Takahiro Kurashima from SLANT_GALLERY on Vimeo.

Takahiro Kurashima's Poemotion, published by Lars Müller, is composed of black and white graphics that become moving optic patterns with the reader's interaction.

A Book of Stacks, by Trinn Tamm, published by Rollo Press.

I bought A Book of Stacks for it's meta-book-nature, hotchpotch typography and linguistic games. Tamm collects covers and excerpts from fictional works whose main preoccupation is alternative languages and ways of communicating or reading. Other items included an ABC Typography and a perforated pamflet book. You can browse more beauty here.

Other bookish elements of this year's Euro-tour include a writer's reading mezzanine at a country house in Umbria, complete with Tintins, musty Mitfords, Graham Greene, Hemingway and painting manuals. In the Swiss lakeside town I am currently staying, there is a book exchange point in the street.  And a trio of mobile art book shops in Milan made me remember the Biblioteca de Jardim in Lisbon - a lending library in the middle of a palmed park. 

Travelling just with a borrowed Kindle, I have not only eurostalgia, but real-page-withdrawal.

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London Conference of Critical Thought

The London Conference of Critical Thought is taking place at Birkbeck College today and tomorrow. I'm organising a stream 'Textual Space/Spatial Text', with @sushikimono (Edwina Atlee), which will involve ideas on (deep breath): signs and semiotics, the reading body, the language of advertising, the space of the book, mapping, walking, building, thresholds, palimpsests, mobility and memory, insides and outsides, reading practice... or at least some of those things.

Simple turns of phrase – passages of time, trains of thought or lines of questioning –reveal complex ways in which space feeds into text. In Ancient Greece, narrative traced subjective geographies – songs were conceived as pathways, sentences as promenades or roads. We framed the stream with these questions: 

What does the act of reading entail and, as city dwellers, are we ever not reading? If the activity of reading involves a kind of wandering and being in the city involves modes of reading, where do text and space overlap?

I'll be giving a paper entitled 'Crossed Thresholds and Textual Entrances', on the ways in which readers enter into texts. Some fragments of this paper will be published here soon. 

Some of the discussions will also be recorded by LCTV and made available to view online.

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Write Only

Read Only has a new sister blog: Write Only. This is where I'll be keeping my journalistic portfolio and non-reading-related writings. Go read!

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Listening-reading

'Dreams of the Blind #2', performed by Ensemble MAE

A review of composer Yannis Kyriakides' Narratives 1: Dreams, which appeared in The Wire, May 2012. Posting here as Kyriakides advocates a kind of listening-reading, where music and text coexist.

Yannis Kyriakides hears music as ‘a time-based art form’;  ‘a fanciful elaboration of the duration of time’. Watching Narratives 1: Dreams, the viewer, or what we might call the listener-reader, becomes aware of the potential for stretching time through sound, and of the rhythms of reading text. Dreams is the first in a series of ‘music text films’ by the Cypriot-born, Amsterdam-residing composer, in which the experience of music is mediated through animated words – a risky endeavour. 

Despite the surreal and somnambulant connotations of its title, Dreams calls for close attention, advocating an active process of listening-reading which measures the weight of words over sound, or the pitch of sound over words.

The collection’s three pieces feature accounts of blind people’s dreams (Dreams of the Blind), an absurd dreams text by Oulipo member Georges Perec (The Arrest), and excerpts from the work of the Roman philosopher Lucretius (The Lucretian Picnic). Narratives only in the most fragmented sense, these texts flash over a black screen to a soundtrack that moves between classical chamber music and minimal electronics, performed by two Dutch ensembles, MAE and Asko | Schönberg. Upper case words in bold type are strung over sparse chimes, scrolling into silence or sped to ascending notes. Rapid violin strokes accompany micro-fictions told in staccato. Glitch catches on rewound gestures, strips of image-light over which text segments glide.

Kyriakides has explored such visual music for several years – an extension of his long-standing interests in forms of listening and the combination of traditional performance with digital media. Previously, he has written of dividing the act of listening into three overlapping categories: conceptual, perceptual and physical. While Dreams seems to adhere most to the first – a conceptual listening that ‘engages us in meanings and intellectual constructions’, with the listener-reader forever made conscious of their dual (and duelling) activities - it is the coexistence of concepts, perceptions and sensory input which resounds. 

At times it as though a battle for attention has been orchestrated, and one wonders whether this is what Kyriakides intended. Or was he hoping for a seamless experience, like the harmony that occasionally surfaces from the meeting of the read and the heard? In fact, the clashes of this battle are the most effective: music and text ‘sound together’, while one alternately opposes the other. More than films, these pieces are exercises in viewing, listening and reading at once; whether words supersede sound or notes overwhelm text remains an oscillating problem.

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Brian Dillon Interview - The White Review

I have an interview with the writer Brian Dillon in The White Review No. 4. We talked about space, place, the material world, and his meticulous will to record. Here's the introduction.

A manuscript page from Dillon's first novella, Sanctuary.

Dillon's writing often traverses the territories of contemporary art; recently he edited a collection of essays, Ruins, as part of Whitechapel Gallery's Documents of Contemporary Art series. His work details disintegration: the state of things or people as they fall apart, physically or psychologically. If the writing of Brian Dillon belongs to any tradition, it is to the ars memoria - one could say he practices a form of architectural mnemonics as he writes. 

Dillon's first book, In the Dark Room (2005), explores the question of memory via an autobiographical excavation of his own childhood. Objects, photographs and buildings, along with representations from art, literature and film, transform the minutaie of a mournful setting into a 'safely cartographic set of images'. 

He has since worked such subjective histories into a novella, Sanctuary (2011), which writes of the ruins of a modernist building via the research of an artist who has gone missing at the site. Scribing interior mind-maps and exterior structures with microscopic detail, Dillon revives telling techniques that the nouveau roman set in place.

Sanctuary's female protagonist is an art critic and editor, roles that Dillon also plays for publications including Frieze, The Guardian and Cabinet. Most recently, he has written the first in Cabinet's 24-Hour Book series, I am Sitting in a Room, in which he traces the relationships between architecture and writing through the scenography of the desk and study. 

We meet at Dillon's office at the Royal College of Art, where he now teaches, amongst course materials and art reviews. After our discussion, we leave along the tucked-away Kensington mews. Dillon offers a shortcut: down the pitch black steps of a churchyard; past a door that opens onto a chequered floor chapel; over uneven cobbles, into the night. 

~

You can order The White Review to read the full interview here.

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The Balloonists

Image: The Electric Typewriter

I have been reading with my legs against a wall, upside down. This posture might be named 'the waitress'. Blood rushes from the feet, words to the head. Eula Biss's The Balloonists  was the book in hand.

Biss (nice nom de plume?) writes paragraphs of prose like poetry, about her, or her protagonist's, life: what became of marriage, what becomes of intimacy, the things which feel heavy and the things which make us light. 

He held up the map between us, so that the light shone through it, the roads on one side knotting with the roads on the other. His hand was a shadow on the web. He pressed his thumb on one point: "This is me". His index finger brushed another point: "This is you." He lifted his hand so that I could see the distance.

If anyone has a copy of No Man's Land they would like to lend me, plus suggestions for a similarly elegant nom de plume, write to the usual address. 

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Light reading

Still from Lis Rhodes' Light Reading, 1978, 16mm.

She began to read, she began to re-read, the story backwards...

The voice-over is read by a woman; upper class, upper case, flat monotone. A woman's experience, with which you can't, are not meant to, or may, relate. 

She watched herself being looked at, she looked at herself being watched, but she couldn't perceive herself as the subject of the sentence.

To begin with, the screen is black. Then there are pictures and the voice-over stops. Torn photographs shuffled by long fingers and cameras which have eyes; cameras as eyes; compact mirrors with cameras and eyes in them. A ribbon of letters, typeset then scrambled. Alphabet soup on celluloid. Material ripped, stuck and unstuck. A hand, a ruler, several rulers; measured measurement, as a rule of thumb. Then the words come back:

The words dance in a moment of light, regale to the sound of her voice, rigged to the rhythm of her body. And now she wrote, and now.

In this disembodied stream of consciousness, language trips up, upon itself. Representation is as representation does. Shot pasted-on shot; structure imposed on shot. Film is form and frame. 'Trying to be in frame. Re-framed, by who? In whose frame?' the voice asks. 'End of reel, reel-to-reel, end-to-end', the voice announces. Here is film, the voice says, in some way. 

Lis Rhodes, at the ICA, until March 25th.