sssh! this is a working library.

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.

More on criticism and ideology:

There is, in fact, no need to drag politics into literary theory: as with South African sport, it has been there from the beginning. I mean by the political no more than the way we organize our social life together, and the power relations this involves; … the history of modern literary theory is part of the political and ideological history of our epoch. … Indeed literary theory is less an object of intellectual enquiry in its own right than a particular perspective in which to view the history of our times. Eagleton, Literary Theory (169)

In other words, the study of criticism reveals the ideologies that pervade a place and time. The critic is both arbiter of that ideology – being a powerful force in its construction – and an at times unwitting victim – unable to escape the very same power structures he drags under his pen to critique.

More on anti-theory (otherwise known as anti-thinking):

Since September 11, a number of anti-theoretical terms have been in vogue in the United States. They include [the aforementioned] ‘evil’, ‘freedom-loving’, ‘bad men’, ‘patriot’, and ‘anti-American’. These terms are anti-theoretical because they are invitations to shut down thought.…Theory – which means, in this context, the taxing business of trying to grasp what is actually going on – is unpatriotic.…This is a pity, since unless the United States is able to do some hard thinking about the world, it is not at all certain that the world will be around for that much longer. Eagleton, After Theory (223)

Eagleton’s definition of theory here bears repeating: theory is “the taxing business of trying to grasp what is actually going on.” In this context, theory is not esoteric or inaccessible, and it’s not relegated to the ivory-tower. It’s simply the way we need to be with the world, if we’re to have a world we want to be in.

What is thus called for is long-term study and thought, in an effort to come up with a serious alternative to global bourgeois democracy – blueprints for a better time, perhaps, and for another place. “What radicals need right now,” says de Zengotita,¹ “isn’t action but theory.” Berman, Dark Ages America (329)

Put another way: when you’re rolling down a hill and picking up speed, digging in your heels or grabbing at twigs isn’t likely to slow your descent. But if you take the time you have to consider how you got to where you are – and you shout it at the top of your lungs – you just may avert someone else from suffering a similar fate. Neither the critic nor the protestor is immortal; but the critic’s words will outlast the protestor’s flags.

1. Berman is quoting Thomas de Zengotita from a 2003 article in Harper’s Magazine. ↩

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.