November 2009
4 posts
The Structure of the Villanelle
At the LRB blog (which also offers a telling reminiscence of CLS by Jim Holt) , Michael Wood finishes a villanelle begun by Colm Toíbín: “A Structuralist Lament.” Here’ an excerpt: Myth and symbol slide and skid, It’s lost for good, the fine old trail. They don’t thrill at the sign as we once did, Trapped as we were between the ego and the id. A commonly-expressed sentiment,...
reading savagely
</object> With the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss last week at the age of 100, we can think of no better tribute than to undertake a fresh engagement in and reappraisal of his ideas and their impact on the life of the mind. inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand Saussure, influenced by the historical and humanistic approach to anthropology pioneered by Franz Boas, and with self-styled...
wild thoughts of savage pansies
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...
tracking memes in deep history
Memes are things that go viral, right? And their native habitat is the web, right?Yes, and no. Yes if we sheer away some of the fleece these terms have grown in the age of the internet. Because while memetics has gained popular currency in the age of LOLcats and rickrolling, it’s worth remembering that Richard Dawkins’ coinage (in The Selfish Gene, 1976) predates the full investiture...
October 2009
10 posts
print on demand ii: reverse engineering the...
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....
ebooks: where are the wild things?
What do e-books look like from the vantage point of bedtime? Reading’s deep roots in our consciousness are grown during the lengthy period we spend playing with books, looking at them, and hearing them read by loving adults. The symbiosis of reading with intimate domestic scenes is in part a product of the technologies that made inexpensive, colorful books possible. And as Maryanne Wolf...
print on demand
My favorite bookshop, Harvard Book Store, earlier this month installed an espresso print-on-demand machine. I’ve been for a visit, but haven’t cooked up anything to print on it. Yet. A post on Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG gives notice of Pike Loop, an exhibition at Manhattan’s Storefront for Art and Architecture that features a truck-mounted robotic arm building an elegant,...
a wholly remarkable book
Pointing out that “the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book,” Jason Kottke urges us to think of reading, and not shopping, as the focal activity of an e-reader. In any ideal e-reader, he argues, blogs, magazines, web sites, PDFs, and email, along with books of all kinds, would be accessible and interpenetrating. In a discussion of single-use devices at Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody suggests...
where are the new genres?
In the midst of the current explosion in e-readers; as the number of iPhone apps climbs beyond one hundred thousand; as standalone devices for reading Wikipedia arrive on the scene; I begin to wonder: where are the new genres these devices should be spawning? The emergence of the cellphone novel, or keitai shosetsu, in Japan seemed like a harbinger of this sort of thing. But despite the vastly...
synchronicity (the red book ii)
“There was a quiet to the room, a hush. And then there it was.” The trailer for the Norton publication of Jung’s Red Book features the scanning of the volume. The Red Book’s publication is a remarkable case of synchronicity. In the midst of the agonies of the lettered culture, with the fortunes of the physical book falling, along comes a codex that demonstrates the...
the lugubrious middlebrow & the agony of the...
In the 20th century, middlebrow celebrated its interests as timeless and universal values. With those interests under fresh assault, it now paints their demise as signal of the End Time. Call it the middlebrow apocalyptic mode.I’m reading “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper,” Richard Rodriguez’s piece in the current Harper’s. A couple of passages...
The Hogwash Statement
I’ve heard from blogger Danny Bloom about his campaign to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. He’s concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from “reading,” and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent...
reverse-engineering the e-book
Well, that’s not exactly what I mean. In a “Room for Debate feature at NYTimes.com called “Does the Brain Like E-Books?”, computer scientist David Gelertner praised the codex as “the best of all word-delivery vehicles,” asserting that “technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it.” He then goes on to limn...
the novel dies a thousand deaths
My friend Kristin Parker is the archivist for Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Recently she shared this snippet of a letter Gardner received from novelist F. Marion Crawford, August 23, 1896: The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that...
August 2009
9 posts
Lines in the Sand
More mind-tickling calligraphy via the marvelous Ministry of Type: this the work of Capetown letterer Andrew van der Merwe, whose medium is beach sand.
Van der Merwe spent several years developing tools to incise letterforms in sand without leaving the ragged ridges and dikes that are familiar to anyone who’s dragged a stick along the beach. Merwe’s instruments carve v-shaped...
“If we consider the occasions on which the Iliad-poet himself appeals to the...”
– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 80–1. Dodds shows us that the urge of the letter is primordial: a retrospective hunger that is twin to prospect. Like the rationalism that was its supposed daughter, the urge to write and read was driven as much by a lively and mystical religious...
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mystic writing pads of memory
To Freud, typical writing media like the paper notepad and the slate offered imperfect versions of memory: either they are too finite and fixed (as in the former case) or too ephemeral (the latter). Conventional writing fell short as a “materialized porton of (the) mnemic apparatus”; “an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces,” he wrote,...
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Scratching the surface
“Now, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it….” Sonnet 71 is traditionally understood as defining the zenith—or the nadir—of the recklessly selfless path Shakespeare’s speaker charts throughout the cycle. Here he importunes the beloved to forget him when he’s gone, warning that their association will only cause him trouble with the “wise...
More Graven Names: Shakespeare, Sonnet 71
No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you hall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vildest worms to dwell; Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O if (I say) you look upon this verse, When I (perhaps)...
"for a scratch'd name to teach..."
A Valediction of My Name, in the Window
John Donne
MY name engraved herein Doth contribute my firmness to this glass, Which ever since that charm hath been As hard, as that which graved it was; Thine eye will give it price enough, to mock The diamonds of either rock.
II.
‘Tis much that glass should be As all-confessing, and through-shine as I; ‘Tis more that it shows thee to...
Tabula Rasa
Commonly attributed to John Locke, the concept of the mind as a tabula rasa, a ”blank slate” as a description of the human mind before it receives the imprint of experience, is deeply rooted in scribal culture. Perhaps it was first articulated by Aristotle in the de Anima where he describes the originary mind as an “uninscribed tablet.” But tabula rasa in fact means an...
July 2009
2 posts
What is Writing? Remembering and Adapting, Nurture...
Describing the work of his colleague L. S. Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria offered this formula: “the young child thinks by remembering, an adolescent remembers by thinking.” (Cognitive Development, p. 11).
Luria and Vygotsky championed a “materialist” approach to psychology, one at least formally in line with Marxist doctrine: consciousness in humans is...
The essence of gesture
I’m getting started on the relationship between writing and gesture. Like everything, it offers circles within circles, from the most subtle and intimate movements of the body to questions of expressiveness, deportment, carriage, moral fortitude, and social responsibility.
Like writing and speech, the magisterium of gesture is vast and diverse. We shake and flutter, grasp and wave, and...
June 2009
8 posts
“These characters, illegible to hundreds of millions of Chinese, never entirely...”
– Henri Michaux, Ideograms in China. Translated by Gustaf Sobin. Michaux points out that for those outside writing’s magisterium, all characters are asemic. And yet they’re alive—alive not only with the power of mystery, but with graphic force, with rhythm, with evoked symmetries in human...
Symmetry isn't causality; it's poetry
Brian Rotman quotes Victor Hugo: “Human society, the world, the whole of mankind is in the alphabet.” After adding the caveat that much of humanity uses other writing systems than the alphabetic ones, Rotman offers his assent: “for Western civilization each of the two originating worlds, Judaic and Greek …. was indeed created out of an encounter with a system of alphabetic...
Watch“At the age of seven,” French calligrapher Julien Breton says, “calligraphy imposed itself on, interfered with, my life.” His style, which he calls “Arabisant,” is a pastiche of Arabic and Persian forms fused with a graffiti artist’s insouciant grasp of the Roman alphabet. Breton speaks no Arabic, and his texts, taken from hip-hop lyrics, are in French. In...
Postliterate asemia →
I’ve written here about Henri Michaux & Xu Bing, masters of asemic writing in works of art. At The New Postliterate, curator Michael Jacobson shares new works in this ancient form. Jacobson is the author of the asemic novella The Giant Fence.
“The only way for you to do it … would be to talk of something else,...”
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 84. Shifting and enlarging the magisterium of writing to include women’s consciousness is the subject of Woolf’s great essay. It has been a work of many generations, from Jane Austen and the Brontës to Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson to...
Your Brain on Writing
“Certainly, for at least the last half millennium,” writes Brain Rotman, “the very concept of a person has adhered to that of a ‘lettered self.” In Becoming Beside Ourselves: the Alphabet, Ghosts, and the Distributed Human Being, Rotman explores this paradigm of the soul—or at any rate its ruins. He follows a long line of thinkers in linking the notion of a certain...
May 2009
40 posts
“Citizens of the Republic (of Letters) carried no passports, but they could...”
– Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Worlds: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, pp. 20–1. The Republic of Letters was a web; its nodes were the printing houses and libraries of great scholars; its members were scholars but also printers, artisans, apothecaries, botanists, and the like. This...
A Style of One's Own
“That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library,” Virginia Woolf observes quite early in A Room of One’s Own. “Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever.”
Woolf (in the person of the protagonist of...
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Grapholexia
Among the phenomena of writing explored in Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy is the rise of the “grapholect,” which he defines as a “transdialectical language formed by deep commitment to writing.” The national languages and of course the literary languages that we know today are scarcely imaginable without such deep commitment to writing; one of Ong’s themes...
Writing is radical
Writing’s effects are radical—its emergence, its intimate role in our culture and consciousness, its very appearance strike at the roots of language, memory, and civilization. But that’s what radical means, of course—it’s from the Latin radix, for root.
In semantic terms, a word’s uninflected meaning is termed its radical. Chinese dictionaries are organized according to...
"Life According to Adam," a poem by Bernardo... →
“As their vocabulary increased, so did the wrinkles on their skin.” Novelist Elise Blackwell points me in Atxaga’s direction, noting that he “links the Fall with the acquisition of language”—a Rousseauvian move. Axtaga appeared at the recent PEN World Voices Festival in New York; he writes in Euskera, and his poems and other works are known around the world.
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Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages:...
For Rousseau, writing inscribes a defeat—but in a battle already long lost by the time writing makes the scene. As Cad Goddeu or the Battle of the Trees of Welsh folklore symbolized for Robert Graves, for Rousseau early language is the issue of a primordial battle for meaning and freedom. But for Rousseau it is not root and branch, but consonant and vowel that go to war against one another,...
“Much of human play, perhaps even most, remains unseen. I mean, of course, the...”
– R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, page 385.
What's the Urge of the Letter?
Perhaps you’re wondering where I’m going with this graphomania. What am I doing with all these trivial observations on ink, wax, print, and pixel? How can I hope to draw together the strands of writing, cognition, evolution, art, literature, religion? What’s the epitome, the gloss, the nut graf, the takeaway?
Well, the easy answer is, I’ll tell you when I’ve found...
Wax poetic
“O that my words were now written! O that they were printed in a book!” Job 19:23 would seem to have presented an puzzle for translators of the Authorized Version. What could the Old Testament scribe mean by “printing”?
In the Latin of Saint Jerome the relevant verbs are scribantur and exarentur (quis mihi tribuat ut scribantur sermones mei quis mihi det ut exarentur in...
“Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book!
That...”
– Job 19:23–24, King James Version. Job’s cry opens a powerful testament of belief. One problem: printing didn’t exist in Job’s time. What was up with the King James translators? Theirs was a confusion that stretches back to the Vulgate and Saint Jerome, and has to do with wax...
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Writing, Play, Evolution
Writing appears quite late in the human career. Modern humans appeared about 200,000 years ago; writing emerges 195,000 years later.
We might assume that this is the case because writing makes enormous demands: cognitive, social, and temporal resources must be stretched in the invention, propagation, and elaboration of written systems of communication.
R. Dale Guthrie, whose The Nature of...
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Xu Bing's Book from the Sky →
Born in Chongqing, China in 1955, Xu Bing is a Macarthur fellow and an artist vibrantly at work in many media. His work frequently engages the lives of books and written and printed letters. For his best-known work, The Book from the Sky (1987–91), an installation in Canada’s National Gallery of Art, Xu Bing created some four thousand calligraphic characters of his own invention and printed...
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Writing and Deep Memory
In The Art of Memory, Frances Yates looks at the famous story Socrates tells in the Phaedrus about the god Theuth’s invention of writing, which the god-king Thamus disparages as “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding.” Thamus declares that with writing the Egyptians will come to “read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they...