He says lots of things about why such an invention is bad for the world but really it comes down to this:

Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.

The “someone” of course is him.

I do wonder if scribes felt the same way when Gutenberg’s first book came off the line – as if they had been replaced, abandoned, their lives’ work discarded and disrespected.

Of course, with just a bit of a bigger view of things (i.e. not from the pov of a single individual in a singular context) there might be found some future redeeming quality to the oncoming freight-train of change.

peardg sent me a link to Colossal Art & Design – an article called “Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee“.

Awesome. Makes me wonder what he would do with the corpus of Gothic Romanticism produced in the late 19th century by British women – not to dis Horace Walpole.

Here’s his website.

The first thing I did was move a few pdfs, buy a non-fiction title and a book of poetry. I wanted to see how these various things would read in the small screen.

Reading the prose is interesting, but not truly transformative, but the poetry!

Goodness. I suspect changes will come of this move to reading digitally.

But before I get to that, just think for a moment of the crisis brought on by the Gutenberg printing press. Before that, all poetry was pretty much strictly aural. It was also a group affair. Verses were recited to live audiences and in a way the distance between minds and bodies was the “white space” of the time.

Gutenberg put a pretty big stopper in that. White space became the margins – and the real space between poet/reciter and audience were pushed out into  limbo. Do we bitch about this today?

Well I suppose some of us do, but not enough to stop reading those heretic paper books.

So back to the point – ereaders essentially eliminate white space in poetry as a means of communication. There are no margins and the size of the page is (at this point) pretty fixed.

Poetry is going to have to be written for the new “page”. But so? Poetry, once the paper page was an ubiquitous reality, was written for that space. It was only then that margins really became an issue and some bright spark decided that they were part of the meaning space. (It was, apparently, a copyist’s mistake to make margins into limbo – I’m sure someone will creatively fuck up again and make an enormous leap sideways into a new creative mythology.)

As I was driving yesterday thinking about, this an image came to mind. It was a spell worker weaving a delicate set of threads—a dynamic system shimmering in a momentary perfect balance—and set humming in a raindrop ready to fall.

This is what, I think, poetry will have to become to make adequate use of the small space afforded by an ereader screen.

In the pre-net age such a thing was really terrible, and in many places it still irrevocably limits the world of readers who can never get another point of view, a point of view that threatens their particular big-wig. But for many of us today censors are a kind of unpaid advertising, and for that I thank you. Want an example? One of the most contentious books in the US is And Tango Makes Three, a children’s story about two male penguins who together hatch an egg and raise a baby. (I can almost hear the right-wing screaming in outrage and fear. Did they not know that many species have same-sex pairs in nature?) Anyway, some kind person made a youtube vid reading the book. And unless you ban youtube on public computers, the book and its story is going to get disseminated. (Yeah!)

I’m going to celebrate my would-be censor’s success at selling the books he or she hates by reading at least one from each list – Canada and the US. Happy reading holiday!

via Wimp

ngrams viewer (Try comparing the terms “witch” and “satan”. Don’t you find that interesting? How much has to do with gender do you think?)

Eco’s collection is more focused than Carriere’s. It is a “collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.” It contains works, for example, by the misinformed astronomer Ptolemy but not by the rightly informed astronomer Galileo. “I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy,” Eco tells us. He loves the man who wrote a book about the dangers of toothpicks, and another author who produced a volume “about the value of being beaten with a stick, providing a list of famous artists and writers who had benefitted from this practice, from Boileau to Voltaire to Mozart.” He adores the hygienist who recommended, in his treatise, the practice of walking backwards. Eco does not tell us how many of these books he actually owns, or how much he would pay for a first edition in mint condition.

A library of error and idiocy. What a wonderful thing!

via Etsy tv

I’ve been dipping: one paragraph here, a small sequence of poems there. It feels a bit like I’m in a hollow of rocks at the bottom of a cliff and the tide is threatening to come in. I think I’ll forgo buying any more until I’ve had time to read for a few weeks.

Once the errands were safely stowed in the trunk, the book, coffee and I (and a delicacy or two) spent the rest of the time between the hot-house sun and the cool breeze.

The book was a perfect thing for those indwelling circumstances. It’s called The Library at Night and is from the first pages a gentle and loving exploration of just why collections of books matter. Deeper and sturdier than the root and vine of a kudzu, the human desire for information and connection has been met by books, and even, occasionally, satisfied by rooms filled with those paper companions. We know this, just as we know the danger books pose to usurpers, and the dangers posed to the rest of us by books’ absence.

I’ve been thinking about this, I suppose, because of the bankruptcy of Borders and the horrendously stupid threatened cut to libraries in the UK. It’s so easy to underestimate the importance of those relationships we develop with the long-dead and the far-away. Some people get the power that comes with reading (which is why we still have book burners and censors) but politicians are often under the impression that books for the general public are not worth the money that, they seem to think, could be better spent on other things. One wonders if they read?

The Library at Night is bit of a personal remedy to how these things have made me feel, and as I said, its effect goes right in the lovely category that already includes sun, cool air and good coffee. There are some really fun bits too, like how he feels the zipping connections between some tomes, as if they are talking to each other in the spare dark of a quiet evening. I’ve noticed this amongst my own collection but I am not as nice a person as Manguel appears to be. I put Starhawk next to John Knox and just know that poor old Knox’s knees are quaking.

It’s just so delightful when books like this come to inhabit my home.