Urge of the Letter

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 increased capacity of smartphones, and despite the new reading niches opened up by devices like the Kindle, little or no generic innovation has occurred.

It’s possible that I’m missing something—if I am, let me know. iPhone apps that offer ebooks may be the answer, but the innovation there seems one of delivery, not genre. But if I’m correct, then why the dearth of invention? Maybe it’s simply a matter of time. Genres are a species of idiom, after all; they need time to evolve. Or maybe it’s because devices like the Kindle are content silos. Or maybe it’s because the iPhone app is the literature of the future.

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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 glorious possibilities of the form. It’s hard to imagine the process by which Jung excoriated and remade himself embodied so thoroughly in any other medium, analog or digital. Surrounded by its worshipful coterie, Jung’s tome here appears not as merely one special book, but the last. Bathed in light, its scanning approximates a ritual apotheosis of the book.

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the lugubrious middlebrow & the agony of the newspaper

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 provoke me to reply:

When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death … it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.

Tying newspapers to civic health is nothing new; anointing them the very fountains of materiality is another turn of the handle. The ties between newspapers and places can be profound, but we can have places, and a sense of the same without newspapers. San Francisco is the home of several new online writing ventures that bring sense of place alive in the context of the web; Bold Italic, one of the newest, is especially exciting. Here in Boston, Universal Hub gives sense of place a lively, webby new twist; author Stephen B. Johnson’s ambitious venture outside.in seeks to offer geospecific, hyperlocal web experiences in communities across the continent.  Do any of them alone replace the newspaper? No. But to answer that question is to be not even wrong when it comes to the state of the public sphere.

It was the pride and function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy or populated enough to have news. Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could write itself into existence. We were Gutenberg Nation.

Sententious, metaphor-sprung, declaratory sentences like these epitomize the Harper’s style. They’re deeply seductive to the liberal imagination—hiding the utter nonsense that frequently lurks deep within subordinate clauses, or in this case, in the plain garb of a simple sentence. American city dwellers indeed did use the newspaper to help define their sense of place; it was but one tool, an important one, but subordinate and retroactive. Furthermore, Gutenberg Nation is an utterly meaningless epithet. Johannes Gutenberg lived a century before anything called “low church” could have existed. Furthermore, he didn’t produce newspapers, but a Bible, one designed to look and function like the manuscript Bibles of his time, only at a lower price. The merely causal connection between Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the existence of the nineteenth century American newspaper does not mean that Gutenberg somehow represents the essence of American public sphere, much less that the public sphere its natural, ideal and inevitable end result. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, as throughout history, contingency rules. History is exactly like the future in one respect: both are but other names for “unintended consequences.”

Here’s a far more useful parallel to draw: like the newspaper in the 21st century, Gutenberg went bankrupt. And yet the emergent public sphere flourished nonetheless.

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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 phenomenon. As Bloom himself puts it,

to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science — that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study — firsthand! up close and personal! — white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.

Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. “screening,” as Bloom says. A few links—

Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more):

He cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of “expert reading” to those of struggling readers:

There’s the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain’s receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner’s short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post):

And Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.

Of course to say “paper to screens” is a massive simplification of the transformation that’s underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we’re experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them … every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It’s nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What’s the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we’ve gone from “claying” to “papyring” to “velluming” to “papering” to “screening,” our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate “reading” in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of “reading”?

New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.

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reverse-engineering the e-book

Well, that’s not exactly what I mean. 

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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 the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course - published every morning for the whole world….

There are a couple of ways to look at this rich quote. In the first, Crawford’s vision is prophetic, if hasty. The nascent, steampunk, fin-de-siècle telephone network took a century to evolve into an internet. The struggle now is to comprehend and accommodate a daily exchange of ideas not among “men of genius,” but among everyone with a connection.

But another way to spin this is to recognize the apocalyptic mode for what it is: not a harbinger, but a self-renewing mode of modern consciousness. The telephone didn’t kill the novel; neither did radio, television, or rock ‘n’ roll. Yesterday, Barnes and Noble has announced that its own ebook reader, the nook, will connect using the AT&T wireless network—the evanescent digitized great-grandchild of Ma Bell (who was still in utero in Crawford and Gardner’s time). I like to think the two perspectives aren’t contradictory. Eras end, media grow old, new modes of consciousness emerge. And so human life is enriched.

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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 trenches, causing an effect like that of classical Roman letters in stone. But Merwe’s characters aren’t Roman in origin—in the work pictured here, they’re based on figures found in West African writing systems with ancient pedigrees (which I shall be revisiting) dating back to the Phoenician. Van der Merwe’s characters, however, are asemic—they don’t refer to speech sounds, but only “play with form.” The piece illustrated above and below is sixteen meters square.

Recommended: Van der Merwe’s portfolio, where you can see him turn this practice to commercial use in another lovely piece that plays with sans serif letters, light, and the tides.

While van der Merwe’s calligraphy is unique, it plays with atavistic and ephemeral form, something akin to doodling, mark-making behavior barely worthy of notice. And yet I want to hypothesize that the origins of writing itself are bound up in the play of sticks and sand. Cuneiform, after all, was made by dragging specially-formed styluses through clay. Surely people made designs in sand and mud for thousands of years before durable writing emerged, playing with form and meaning.

In the 1990s, a development program called “Reflect” sought to bring some of the benefits of literacy to people in rural communities in Asia and Africa. Aid workers would bring farmers and traders, husbands and wive together in dusty town centers, where they would draw simple charts in the sand to outline their work schedules, their supplies, and their crops. Populating their charts with abstract, metonymic symbols for corn and rice, for wood-carrying and cooking, they could make the patterns of their lives visible—and then they could revise and play with alternatives. Although we think of writing as private and durable, the texts of the Reflect program were communal and ephemeral—and perhaps this is something like writing’s original condition.

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, “seem to be mutually exclusive properties in the apparatus which we use as substitutes for our memory: either the receptive surface must be renewed or the note must be destroyed.”

Freud observes that while other technologies for extension of the senses—ear trumpets, spectacles, cameras—are models of the sense organs themselves, writing “seem(s) imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent—even though not unalterable—memory-traces of them.”

While most writing media make for very imperfect virtual memory systems, Freud found a more suggestive example in the so-called “mystic writing pad,” versions of which are still sold in drug stores and toy stores for the use of children. Modern examples consist of a wax-covered card with a two-layered plastic overlay attached at the top edge. Using a stylus, one writes upon the plastic overlay, pressing it into the dark wax, which shows through as a mark on the lower translucent plastic overlay. A clear sheet of plastic atop this layer protects the lower overlay (which in Freud’s time was wax paper) from permanent inscription. By peeling these overlays from the wax one “erases” these marks, as it were magically.

In the short essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” quoted throughout this post, Freud explores the erasable wax tablet as a near-perfect illustration of his idea of the links between perception and memory. Perceptions arrive, making contact with the substrates of memory and the unconscious; their traces last awhile, until the outer surface is swept clean. Atop it all, a clear layer seeks to protect the fragile ego (I mean the plastic) from indelible damage by limiting the force of impressions intruding from the outside world. And yet a trace always remains—beneath the superficial layers, down in the dark wax, the traces of remembered inscriptions mingle indelibly.

If only Freud had lived to experience the Etch-a-sketch! Its ungainly mechanism seems more suggestive of our labored grasp of reality—and its mechanism of forgetting, akin to suppressed memory, is effectuated with the trauma of a vigorous upside-down shake. Or consider the Auquadoodle: a tablet impregnated with “hydrochromatic ink” which turns color with the application of water by brush or pen, only to fade back to a blank slate as the water evaporates—just as memory itself slips implacably as the once-indelible marks give way to dessication and senescence.

The title of Freud’s essay is punning—read wrong, it makes it sound as if he composed his work upon the very “Wunderblock” he describes. Like writing on the mystic pad, Freud’s theories have largely been peeled away from the surface discourse—and yet they remain impressed into the dark, sticky stuff of the collective unconscious, where they’ve taken up residence among an uneasy palimpsest of gods, mythology, and the constellations. The bright lines have faded, but the grooves remain.