Roger Horrocks
The books to come, Alan Loney (Cuneiform Press, 2010), 136 pp., $39.95
The books to come, Alan Loney (Cuneiform Press, 2010), 136 pp., $39.95
Our media landscape is changing at a greater speed than ever before. It is likely that children born 20 years from now who discover a copy of a printed newspaper will need to ask a grandparent to explain the function of this curious object.
Those children will never have seen ‘film’, a strip of celluloid with sprocket holes. (That analogue medium will be as obsolete as the megaphones through which film directors once shouted their commands.) Today’s television set will have become a quaint relic. Tomorrow’s children will also be baffled to encounter a DVD (not to mention a VHS tape), or a letter sent by ‘snail mail’, or a wristwatch, or a telephone attached by a cord to a base.
The key question for bibliophiles like ourselves is whether the printed book will similarly become obsolete. I can’t help thinking of the second-hand shop I visited in a country town the other day where old books were piled up in a corner gathering dust. So far, the traditional book has survived more vigorously than other non-digital forms of communication, but it too is visibly losing ground. Amazon now sells almost twice as many ‘e-books’ as hardcover books, and it expects e-book sales to overtake paperback sales by the end of 2011.
The media have never known a time of such dizzying change. The closest equivalent was the period from 1880 to 1910 which saw the introduction of film, radio, and the first experiments with television. The telephone began to be installed in homes in the 1890s. The same period introduced new technologies such as electric light, the automobile and the aeroplane. Modernism in literature and the arts would have happened regardless of those changes but many of its practitioners were fascinated by them, such as the Futurists who looked to them for both themes and techniques, or the poets and novelists influenced by film editing. It is a curious coincidence that the turn of a century has so often been accompanied by an upheaval in both technology and the arts. An earlier example was the end of the eighteenth century when Romanticism emerged. Poets such as Shelley and Coleridge were excited by the scientific discoveries of the day, as Richard Holmes has chronicled in The Age of Wonder (London, Harper Press, 2008).
Our own new century seems not yet to have provoked any radical activity in the arts, unless it has happened in obscure corners of the Web where we have not yet discovered it. But meanwhile there have been a number of thoughtful books commenting on the changes to reading and writing. Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (New York, Harper, 2008) draws on scientific evidence to explain how learning to read books shapes and develops a child’s mind, then in her final chapter she considers the changes now being produced by the computer. The plasticity of a young brain ensures that, for better or worse, it is going to be wired up differently. Lucky children will learn the old book-based skills as well as the new digital ones and will develop the ability to ‘code switch’. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York, W W Norton, 2010) by Nicholas Carr (a former writer for Wired) offers a less hopeful scenario. Children are becoming more adept at scanning, skimming and multi-tasking – skills needed in a world flooded by an increasing number of texts and images – but they tend to lack the patience for slow, careful reading. The way film and television editing has accelerated illustrates the same shrinking attention span.
Sherman Young’s The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book (Sydney, University of NSW, 2007) argues that traditional ‘book culture’ has already collapsed, and we need to get busy developing a new kind of e-book culture, embracing and experimenting with the new technology. The most pessimistic commentator is Morris Berman whose The Twilight of American Culture (NY, W W Norton, 2006) sees American culture sinking into a new Dark Age, with the Internet intensifying the populism that already dominates the older media. Berman argues that the skills of serious reading will only survive if individuals work to preserve them like the rebel book-lovers in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or the monks who kept culture alive during the Middle Ages.
DEEP READING
Alan Loney’s The books to come offers a fresh perspective by choosing to focus not on sociological or economic aspects but on the deepest aspects of our experience of books. He takes his title from Maurice Blanchot’s Le Livre à Venir, written over 50 years ago. Loney adds diversity (‘books’ plural), but he respects the fact that the French theorist’s writing came ‘from the depth of his life/work as a reader’ (65). Loney’s thoughts emerge from the depth of his own life/work as writer and printer as well as reader.
Our own new century seems not yet to have provoked any radical activity in the arts, unless it has happened in obscure corners of the Web where we have not yet discovered it. But meanwhile there have been a number of thoughtful books commenting on the changes to reading and writing. Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (New York, Harper, 2008) draws on scientific evidence to explain how learning to read books shapes and develops a child’s mind, then in her final chapter she considers the changes now being produced by the computer. The plasticity of a young brain ensures that, for better or worse, it is going to be wired up differently. Lucky children will learn the old book-based skills as well as the new digital ones and will develop the ability to ‘code switch’. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York, W W Norton, 2010) by Nicholas Carr (a former writer for Wired) offers a less hopeful scenario. Children are becoming more adept at scanning, skimming and multi-tasking – skills needed in a world flooded by an increasing number of texts and images – but they tend to lack the patience for slow, careful reading. The way film and television editing has accelerated illustrates the same shrinking attention span.
Sherman Young’s The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book (Sydney, University of NSW, 2007) argues that traditional ‘book culture’ has already collapsed, and we need to get busy developing a new kind of e-book culture, embracing and experimenting with the new technology. The most pessimistic commentator is Morris Berman whose The Twilight of American Culture (NY, W W Norton, 2006) sees American culture sinking into a new Dark Age, with the Internet intensifying the populism that already dominates the older media. Berman argues that the skills of serious reading will only survive if individuals work to preserve them like the rebel book-lovers in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, or the monks who kept culture alive during the Middle Ages.
DEEP READING
Alan Loney’s The books to come offers a fresh perspective by choosing to focus not on sociological or economic aspects but on the deepest aspects of our experience of books. He takes his title from Maurice Blanchot’s Le Livre à Venir, written over 50 years ago. Loney adds diversity (‘books’ plural), but he respects the fact that the French theorist’s writing came ‘from the depth of his life/work as a reader’ (65). Loney’s thoughts emerge from the depth of his own life/work as writer and printer as well as reader.
Writing precisely and sensuously about ‘the life, death, and erotics’ of books (93), he probes many familiar but seldom-discussed aspects of our lives within the landscape of books. Digital enthusiasts may see this as the nostalgic description of a sunset industry, but Loney is careful to look forwards as well as backwards, to offer a Janus-like perspective. While his book is a powerful summary of key values and skills that need to be kept alive, it also advocates an experimental approach to the new media. He sees a lack of imagination in the term ‘e-book’ since objects of this new type are ‘as distinguishable from books as telephones are from tv’.
Loney’s book is never polemical in a simplistic way but runs strongly counter to mainstream trends. He writes: ‘I want to read deeply rather than widely’ (16). Deep reading is a matter not of ploughing through a book cover-to-cover but of finding challenging texts and engaging slowly and passionately with them. Loney is bemused by the academic mania for huge bibliographies. Deep reading has never been typical but – as documented in The Shallows – it has come to seem less and less relevant. A crucial ingredient is what Loney describes as the awareness of how any text is ’embodied and embedded’ (106). This implies thinking hard about the differences between ‘books, scrolls, tablets, e-books’ (134), and the differences between oral, handwritten, typewritten, printed, and computer writing. These possibilities are constantly interacting but each has its own dynamics and its own history. Digital enthusiasts are working hard to erase these distinctions by their sweeping use of terms such as ‘text’, ‘content’, ‘print culture’, etc. As media ‘converge’, words supposedly ‘migrate’ effortlessly from one medium to another. Now ‘All we are supposed to get is the text and nothing but the text’. According to this utopian digital view, ‘the text has at last been set free from its carrier, the message from its medium’ (98).
This view is an amnesia cancelling out the modernist awareness that form and content are inseparable. In many productive ways the modernists understood writing as ‘the-work-of-the-body-in-the-body-of-the-world’ (70). Writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and later Charles Olson and Robert Creeley made serious use of the page as a musical score. Loney reminds us that in New Zealand in the 1930s ‘the emergent poetry canon and the book production values in which it was published were in the hands of the same people,’ such as Denis Glover and the Caxton Press (16–17). He also discusses the distinctive spacing and punctuation in the work of Kendrick Smithyman and Ursula Bethell. (Incidentally, the unique punctuation in Leigh Davis’s Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life, published in 2010 by Otago University Press, is one of the few recent occasions when a publisher has respected subtleties of this kind and not sought to impose a house style.)
The principle of embodiment informs reading, writing, and producing books, activities that Loney constantly interrelates. It is hardly surprising that a writer who has designed, typeset, printed and bound more than 50 books and is acknowledged internationally as an outstanding printer has many striking comments to offer on subjects such as binding, typography and design – or, in these lines, paper:
for some reason, and I have handled hundreds, even thousands of them, the two piles
of hand-cut handmade paper on my bench this morning are beautiful to me – very
beautiful, as if I had suddenly understood after all this time that it is paper that
makes a book, and more so than type or words or images. It’s an odd event for
someone in my position to be sure, but it is certainly what it feels like this morning
under a blue sky after night’s rain with silver drops highlighting myriad leaves (57–58)
of hand-cut handmade paper on my bench this morning are beautiful to me – very
beautiful, as if I had suddenly understood after all this time that it is paper that
makes a book, and more so than type or words or images. It’s an odd event for
someone in my position to be sure, but it is certainly what it feels like this morning
under a blue sky after night’s rain with silver drops highlighting myriad leaves (57–58)
In her interesting Foreword, Jenni Quilter, a New Zealander now at New York University, describes how reading this book heightened her sense of the physicality of all books: ‘we have an out-of-book experience, consider what’s between our hands … , seeing it as a marvellous object whose proportions are newly odd’ (13).
INTERACTIVITY
Enthusiasts make much of the Internet’s ability to give us access to the past, but there is now a danger that ‘all ye know … and all ye need to know’ is limited to the material available online. History is decontextualised if texts are never encountered in their original forms. Similarly, ‘The problem with the computer and its capacity for typesetting is that it erases the histories of the practices upon which its array of click-on options is based. You don’t have to know anything about typographical history, just how to use the software.’ (20) What is at risk is not only the sense of history but the extra precision that used to result from having to make time-intensive choices by hand.
The Internet offers exciting new possibilities of ‘interactivity’ but Loney’s version of this concept is more challenging than the hasty give-and-take that characterises so much web debate. He keeps the complexity of a subject always in mind by exploring it from different angles, by a mix of poetry and prose, and by a constant flow of questions. This way of promoting ‘readerly engagement’ (101) is reminiscent of the way Ludwig Wittgenstein used to probe a theme. As Loney explained in his previous book The Printing of a Masterpiece (Melbourne, Black Pepper, 2008): ‘I rather like these small conundrums that look like questions … . they are more like places to dwell in … . If while writing I decide to dwell there, I know that many things can be written that solving the puzzle … would not yield’ (5). As each of the six sections (which were written originally for different media occasions) circles a set of related questions, it provokes the reader to consider their own experiences and answers. This is, in one sense, a powerful model for how a blog could function.
Loney seeks to balance the values we attach to ‘the book’ with an acknowledgement of the dangers of fetishizing it. The most positive view is eloquently summarised by his account of the traditional Chinese belief that it is a crime to destroy a book:
A book has chi. All the crafts that go into making a book, paper-making, ink-making,
calligraphy, drawing, printing, binding, are individually revered within the culture.
To destroy them is to revere what everyone reveres. The book contains both the
expressiveness and the energy of its making and of its maker. It is a mark of the
cultivation & achievement of its creators regardless of whether it holds any
interest for others or to later generations. Passed on generationally, the book
registers the attainment of knowledge thru the suffering and the craft of the
individual, which is then given over to the rest of humanity. (57)
To destroy them is to revere what everyone reveres. The book contains both the
expressiveness and the energy of its making and of its maker. It is a mark of the
cultivation & achievement of its creators regardless of whether it holds any
interest for others or to later generations. Passed on generationally, the book
registers the attainment of knowledge thru the suffering and the craft of the
individual, which is then given over to the rest of humanity. (57)
Loney sympathises with this view, but at the same time knows that worship of ‘The Book’ can become precious or excessively canonic. The most extreme example is the fundamentalist religious attitude. As he puts it: ‘The West still can’t quite believe that all gods are false’ (43).
Since Loney challenges the assumption that a ‘book review’ can be merely a review of the text (or ‘content’), it is important for me to consider the shape of the present book. Loney did not design this one himself but Cuneiform Press (at the University of Houston-Victoria) and its designer Kyle Schlesinger have done an elegant job. The book is a clothbound hardcover with an excellent choice of typeface – a narrow upright type called Quadraat. Appropriately this was designed digitally by Fred Smeijers, and like so much else in this book the typeface is a meeting of old and new, using classical serifs but giving them a fresh feel. Where Loney’s personal influence is apparent is his distinctive approach to punctuation and the unjustified right margins (he writes eloquently about ‘asymmetric’ layout in modernism).
To write a book today about ‘the book’s sometimes delicious, sometimes terrifying, sometimes banal excess’ (86) is to risk being regarded as on the wrong side of the digital generation gap. But what this book offers is the most productive way for us to move forwards. It identifies the values within book culture that we must fight to keep alive, such as the awareness of medium and ’embodiment’, the sense of history, the pleasures of ‘exactitude’, and the practice of ‘deep reading’. The book is not only a description but a striking demonstration of those values. At the same time, it urges us to engage fully with the new technologies, with as strong a hunger for innovation as the modernists a century ago.
ROGER HORROCKS was the founder of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. Recently he has edited a collection of prose poems by Len Lye (Body English) and made a film about Lye (Art that Moves) which won the Van Gogh Award at the 2010 Amsterdam Film Festival.
Leave a Reply