the end of the book.... (again)

More from This is not the end of the book; by Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere.  I am still thinking about it and re-reading parts of it.  Background:  It was recently translated from the French and I picked it up when I was in London - in the bookshop at the British Library. (Oh - such a place!) The book is full of the enthusiasm of these two great thinkers...for all things - but especially all things bookish. Yes they can sound "pontificatey"  but I think they've earned it.

This idea of "the end of the book" has been going on for a few decades now.  My MFA thesis exhibit was (coughs) in 1987 and titled "Books in Space."  It was my reflecting on the "new" idea that books were disappearing, as well as how we navigate "different kinds" of space (ex. family space, academic space, community space).  I was beginning to explore calling into question (among other things) the nature of just what it was that constituted a book, or reading for that matter...as well as what was happening to books.  The idea of "books in space" came from the initial thinking and research - my outreach to astronauts - asking them what books they would take into space.  The only one who answered me was Sally Ride, who said she would take "The Tao of Pooh."

“But what is a book? And what will change if we read onscreen rather than by turning the pages of a physical object? What will we gain, and more importantly, what will we lose? Old-fashioned habits, perhaps. A certain sense of the sacred that has surrounded the book in a civilisation that has made it our holy of holies. A peculiar intimacy between the author and reader, which the context of hypertextuality is bound to damage. A sense of existing in a self-contained world that the book and, along with it, certain ways of reading used to represent.” ― Jean-Philippe de Tonnac, This Is Not the End of the Book

Anyone involved in book arts - making, teaching or critiquing - is very aware what is meant by "reading."  And it has little to do with words on a page.  It goes back to that question I was thinking about in 1987 - how DO we navigate different kinds of space?  How do we read form, materiality, the way text is place on a page?  It is so much more than content - it is more akin to what Barthes wrote about in The Pleasure of the Text;

Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface:  I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple simple temporality of its reading. 

When someone hands me an artists' book for the first time - it is like beginning a journey.  The way it is built - the way it smells and the sound of the pages when I turn them.  Are there surprises?  I love surprises.  I feel this way about reading any new book -- always have.  Ahhh I'm starting to ramble now -- next post will try for more clarity.

Read this rock - Black River Harbor, Lake Superior

THIS IS NOT.....

.....the end of the book;

Picked this book up in London -  an english translation of a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere.  I am savoring each page of it because it is so rich with insight, with history and with the kind of reflection that only wisdom and experience can bring.

In the preface, French writer Jean Philippe De Tonnac writes about books and cathedrals - citing the work of Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,

"The book will kill the building....When you compare [architecture] to the idea, which...needs only a sheet of paper, some ink and a pen, is it surprising that the human intellect should have deserted architecture for the printing press."

De Tonnac goes on to write:

"Well the great cathedrals - those bibles in stone - did not vanish, but the avalanche of manuscripts and then printed text that appeared at the end of the Middle Ages did render them less important.  As culture changed, architecture lost its emblematic role.  So it is with the book.  There is no need to suppose that the electronic book will replace the printed version.  Has film killed painting?  Television cinema?  However, there is no doubt that the book is in the throes of a technological revolution that is changing our relationship to is profoundly."

And so the stage is set for a wonderful conversation between these two men.  Some of the topics in this far reaching discussion deal with the impermanence of most new technology platforms compared to the printed page.  New technology changes and become obsolete at a faster and faster pace.  Unless one has the resources to keep all of them nearby - information can become inaccessible.

In my own lifetime I have seen phonographs and type-writers and brownie cameras be replaced by reel to reel tape, word-processors and sx70's.  Then computers, digital cameras and ipads.  The storage and playback of each of these permutations is also different.  Don't we all have floppy discs somewhere that we can no longer access?  Reels of super 8 film, hard drives, jump drives, cassette decks....the list goes on.

Interesting to me that it was panned by several reviewers.  I find it rewarding - and worth picking up and putting down over and over again.  More information about the book here.