sssh! this is a working library.

Skipping stones

As we read, we build up an understanding of the text from small pieces. Our eyes travel along the lines in a series of jumps called “saccades.” Between saccades they stop for a moment (called a fixation) so that we absorb text in chunks varying in length from a few characters to up to about eighteen. … An experienced reader or one who is familiar with the subject fixates for shorter periods and uses longer saccades, enabling him to take in over three hundred words per minute. Unger, While You’re Reading (64)

When demonstrated on the page, a saccade is drawn as a parabola that touches down on a letter, reverses course, flies over a word or two, and touches down again, much like the bouncing ball sing-along hints you may remember from Sesame Street. This suggests another way of thinking about the reading process—in which reading is akin to skipping stones.

A beginner reader will skip once, perhaps twice, then sink. But an experienced reader will skip for pages without effort, barely noticing the brief dips into the lake, attuned instead to the moments in the air—during which the lake disappears and is replaced by the images and sounds that the text depicts. She flies above the text, and the text transforms into a reflection of the writer’s world.

It’s that sense of being in the air that defines reading—what we also refer to as being “lost” in the text. We no longer see words, we no longer notice the music in the coffee shop or the sound of construction next door—we see the images that the text conjures in our mind, images whose foundation is built by the writer but whose final existence we create ourselves.

More on process:

The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through, and, where possible – in the academic industry – to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. Adorno, Minima Moralia (80)

There’s a certain amount of alchemy to writing that ought not to be expunged. It’s tempting to try to sort it out (a temptation I am often prone to), but in the sorting you’ll inevitably lose the whole.

Kinross on the typographer’s bible:

For all its learning, for all the width of its reference, Bringhurst’s book lacked a critical or historical sense. In this vision, concentrated so exclusively on the well-resolved product and neglecting the dimension of process (and thus the unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded), there could be no power of explanation. Kinross, Modern Typography (175)

I love the language here. “The unfinished, the disputed, the failed and discarded” evoke the poor, the neglected, the tired and sick; he’s appealing to our sense of democracy. No government can succeed if it oppresses or ignores the majority of its people, just as no theory can be complete if it forsakes the process by which a work is created. Criticism does not admit of immaculate conception.

Another lovely example of etymology used well:

But more importantly, this work is an essay in that it ‘essays’ or ‘attempts’. This is perhaps better conveyed by the German word ‘ein Versuch’: an essay, but, in its primary meaning, an ‘attempt’ or ‘experiment’. What is attempted here is a shift of orientation for the history of typography, and so also for it’s practice. Kinross, Modern Typography (8)

It’s a feature of the modern (or postmodern, depending on how you perceive the boundaries) to be self-conscious about your intellectual endeavors, in part because the act of declaring anything to be “true” becomes precarious, but also because the process becomes just as interesting – if not more so – than the end result.

Printing becomes modern with the spread of knowledge about printing itself: with the published descriptions of its practices; with the classification of its materials and processes; with the co-ordination of dimensions of materials, enabling their exchange and better conjunction; with the establishment of a record of its history. These things, which one begins to see in the late seventeenth century in (especially) England and France, are realizations of the implications of printing to discuss that process itself. Kinross, Modern Typography (16)

A self-conscious experiment

Any intellectual endeavor is bound to be more interesting if it is unsure of itself. A supremely confident effort will only reach as far as necessary to confirm its assumptions; it will go no further, and it will not question its reasons for existing. By contrast, an insecure process will act out its doubt by exploring, looking for the ways in which it may prove to be incorrect or incomplete or even irrelevant. Instead of searching for tautologies that prove its own effectiveness, it will seek out every plausible way to be discredited and dissect them, one by one.

It’s an exercise in discomfort, but one which can be fruitful if you’re persistent.

I was intentionally abstract about the purpose and methods at work on this site when I started it, knowing that if I prescribed a path from the beginning it would be easier but less engaging. Now, a little more than a month later, some of that purpose is coming into relief – a few edges of a path that is still being carved. This act of tracking and responding to books – collecting the texts that strike me as holding some truth – is an attempt to sketch out the foundations of a personal critical approach, the first step of which is to define the shape of my own beliefs; from there, I can better explore and question them.

The critical approach questions: and it questions its own assumptions as part of a refusal to take anything unquestioned. There are no beliefs – not of a golden age, nor of transparent communication – that can stand free of these questions and doubts. In this way the critical approach will always live on, never quite satisfied. It is coloured by dissatisfaction, even melancholy: it lives in the contexts with which it finds itself, but questions the terms of those contexts and is often unhappy with them. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (361)

So, the process I now find myself involved in is one of definition (seeking out the source of my beliefs in the books I’ve read and reread) and simultaneous questioning (following these beliefs from book to book to see if they become clearer or merely dilute, turning them inside out as they pass through different writers) all the while paying attention to the language itself, cognizant (and accepting) of my prejudice for ideas that are articulated with beautiful prose.

I am also beginning to think more clearly about the relationship between design and criticism, whether it be of a criticism that itself addresses design, or of a critical approach that is communicated through design. When developing any critical method, you must consider why it needs to exist in the first place: what are we to learn from it? How will it reshape what we already know (or think we know)? Who does it benefit?

The reproduction and distribution of text is part of the life-blood of social-critical dialogue. The argument for openness and clarity in typography is made, most importantly, for this reason. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (362)

This part of the path is still woody and overgrown, but I can just make out an opening ahead: if typography is the means by which criticism is distributed, then criticism owes much of its existence to typography. And typography – when executed in such a way as to serve the text and not compete with it – is a participant in that criticism. It is the parameters of that participation that I am keenly interested in.

That, it seems, is the direction I’m headed; and I’m happy to say, I don’t know where I’ll be when I get there.

Coming back around again to criticism and ideology:

… cultural studies has been developed in application to popular culture and is in opposition not only to an exclusive, high culture but also to all distinctions of value within culture. It thus conflicts with the highminded, reforming and occasionally revolutionary way of designing (of William Morris – and company), which would certainly maintain distinctions of good and bad in the ways in which the material world is ordered: on such presuppositions must any confident design education be based. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (322)

There are two ideologies at play here: that of the cultural critic and that of the typographer. The practice of cultural studies is informed by concerns of oppression and driven by an interest in culture at the margins; as such, it treats with suspicion any attempt to discern the value of a particular cultural element, believing that such distinctions are usually an attempt by one culture to oppress another. This relativistic stance emerges from a deeply held interest in reducing inequality.

However, the typographer is an aesthetician, someone who is rooted in the material world (and not just the intangible world of ideas); he believes in craftsmanship and skill. The iterative process of design – start with something rough and slowly work to refine it, improving its physical qualities with each step – gives birth to a belief system that registers the difference between good and bad without apology. As such, the typographer requires a critical perspective that embraces the work of assigning value and formulates a process for doing so; he cannot make sense of an approach that denies all distinctions of value in the name of equality.

Kinross’ larger point here is that we cannot simply borrow literary theories and apply them to design without first considering their effectiveness – and, I would argue, their underlying beliefs – with respect to this different medium.

I’m fond of metaphor. It’s probably the most common trick in my literary arsenal – especially when joined with a little hyperbole – and for that reason alone I know I have to keep a watchful eye over them when I write, lest they get too far away from my purpose that they obscure instead of clarifying.

So, in the first, rough draft of my previous post, when reaching for examples of things that are “archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to,” I wrote “tuberculosis and the catherine wheel.” Tuberculosis seems to make sense; it’s a word that invokes the diseases of yesteryear, before vaccines and clean hospitals; and it’s ugly, at odds with the antiseptic vision of medical care we hold today. But that catherine wheel: at first, it seems well enough; it’s an image of medieval barbarism, and a vicious one at that. It has the right balance of antiquity and masochism to sit alongside the reference to TB. It was sufficiently over the top to arouse, but not quite absurd enough to send the whole thing careening off the road. And yet something wasn’t right.

Is the catherine wheel a thing of the past? Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, phrases like “waterboarding” and “stress position” and “illegal rendition” have entered (or reentered) the lexicon. In this climate, who’s to say the catherine wheel won’t yet see a renaissance? And then it wouldn’t be a relic; and then the analogy doesn’t hold.

Which left me with just one example when the rhythm of the sentence required two. What belonged alongside tuberculosis as a relic of things past? I considered an extinct animal (the wooly mammoth, perhaps); but the phrase was intended to suggest things that we are happy to have behind us, things which we are glad to have moved on from. I don’t know about you, but I think the world would be a more interesting place if the wooly mammoth were still with us, immune to the spears we throw at it, unconcerned about our privileged place in the world, unaware of the gods on our side.

The gods on our side. There it is. If there’s anything certain about the American political establishment today, it’s that the worshipping of one god (and a particular one at that) is not on the decline. I deleted “catherine wheel” and typed in “polytheism” instead.

On the ways in which a text can change as it passes through the reader:

What has begun to change since I moved into the orbit of Anya is not my opinions themselves so much as my opinion of my opinions. As I read through what mere hours before she translated from a record of my speaking voice into 14-point type, there are flickering moments when I can see these hard opinions of mine through her eyes – see how alien and antiquated they may seem to a thoroughly modern Millie, like the bones of some odd extinct creature, half bird, half reptile, on the point of turning into stone. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (137)

In a similar vein, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which blogging affects the writing process, given the instant (and democratic) feedback and, perhaps more importantly, the exposure it affords. I use the word “exposure” in two ways: first, in the sense that the web provides an immediate and accessible audience, something that can be difficult to achieve in print (not that it’s easier on the web, but it is more democratic); and, second, in that it pulls the curtain away from the writer’s desk, “exposing” a process that is usually kept behind closed doors and only referred to in abstract, romantic terms. More on this soon.

First things first

It is impossible to write an effective first post on a blog. If I were writing a book, I would save the first page for last, after every other word had been scrutinized and settled. But while a book marks the end of a writing process that usually remains hidden, a blog shows every step (and misstep) along the way. I can’t save the first page for last, because I may never arrive at the end.

I do know a few things about the beginning, though. The concept for this site first formed in my head about a year ago and traveled through several different versions before arriving at what you see here. One version imagined long essay-like posts that would, in sequence, build towards a larger work (the book model); another fantasized about a unique design for every post (the editorial model); a third dreamed of elaborate visualizations relating each book within the library to every other (I still hold that one close). All were discarded when they failed to keep my attention long enough to finish them, or else proved so complex as to seem prescribed, as if the project were already finished before I’d even started.

This version emerged from an afternoon spent flipping through old journals and deciphering my scribbles. For years I have jotted down passages that struck me and documented the books they came from, as well as what other books they reminded me of. I never made a conscious decision to catalog my reading but was instead driven to record new ideas as they struck me. Sadly, a pile of journals has proven to be a largely inaccessible resource, with most of these notes rarely, if ever, revisited.

At the same time, I was able to recognize how the notes on each new book responded to and surfaced from those on the books that came before. I discovered The Comedy of Survival in The Ecocriticism Reader and found many ideas in concert with Richard Manning’s revisionist history of agriculture, Against the Grain. I couldn’t help but think back to Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo as I read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; Limbo was a strange and horrible little book, but it seems more relevant in retrospect. I’ve reread Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians several times in recent years, no doubt returning to it because it seems to so perversely capture the war in Iraq. I had just finished it again when I turned to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine; Coetzee seemed to hover over every page, his fictional image of torture weaving its way into Klein’s accounts of the real thing.

This site grows out of these journals. It’s an effort to document the ideas in my library and follow the links from book to book. I don’t know what the end result will be (or if there will be an end) but I hope the path to get there will be interesting. I also hope that the methods employed here serve as a model for others; there are many fascinating things to be discovered in the spaces between books, if you take the time to look.

I’m beginning with a book on theory, partly because I expect theory to be an overarching theme, but also because I was reading it as I finalized the design of this site. I read it more purposefully as a result, already attuned to the ways in which this blog could change both the way I read and the way I write. I look forward to discovering – and sharing – just what those changes will be.