GABBLER RECOMMENDS: A World Ordered Only By Search The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 17

This kind of reading was grounded not just in the book generically, but in a particular book. Remember, of course, that books were relatively scarce artifacts and that reproducing them was a laborious task, although often one lovingly undertaken. This much is well known. What might not be as well known is that many features that we take for granted when we read a book had not yet been invented. These include, for example, page numbers, chapter headings, paragraph breaks, and alphabetical indexes. These are some of the dozen or so textual innovations that Illich had in mind when he talks about the transformation of the experience of reading in the 12th century. What they provide are multiple paths into a book. If we imagine the book as an information storage technology (something we can do only on the other side of this revolution) then what these new tools do is solve the problems of sorting and access. They help organize the information in such a way that readers can now dip in and out of what now can be imagined as a text independent of the book.

I’ve found it helpful to think about this development by recalling how Katherine Hayles phrased one of the themes of How We Became Posthuman. She sought to show, in her words, “how information lost its body.” Illich is here doing something very similar. The text is information that has lost its body, i.e. the book. According to Illich, until these textual innovations took hold in the 12th century, it was very hard to imagine a text apart from its particular embodiment in a book, a book that would’ve born the marks of its long history—in the form, for example, of marginalia accruing around the main text.

I’ve also thought about this claim by analogy to the photograph. The photograph is to the book as the image is to the text. This will likely make more sense if you are over 35 or thereabouts. Today, one can have images that live in various devices: a phone, a laptop, a tablet, a digital picture frame, the cloud, an external drive, etc. Before digital photography, we did not think in terms of images but rather of specific photographs, which changed with age and could be damaged or lost altogether. Consequently, our relationship to the artifact has changed. Roland Barthes couldn’t be brought to include the lone photograph he possessed of his mother in his famous study of photography, Camera Lucida published in 1980. The photograph was too private, his relationship to it too intimate. This attitude toward a photographic image is practically unintelligible today. Or, alternatively, imagine the emotional distance between tearing a photograph and deleting an image. This is an important point to grasp because Illich is going to suggest that there’s another analogous operation happening in the 12th century as the individual detaches from their community. But we’ll come back to that in the last section.

[Via]

Only a few more hours to download the mythpunk ebook THE PRE-PROGRAMMING for free:

Hashtags as annotations in books:

When reading Michelle Murphy’s chapter called “Against Population, Towards Alterlife” in Making Kin, Not Population, I (Gabbler) found Murphy’s particular use of hashtags inserted into the text to be fitting little asides — invitations to explore “notes” later online; annotations even the reader could contribute to. Footnotes and endnotes do not allow for such dialog or collaborative annotating. Hashtags are brilliant:

Aspiring towards decolonizing and queer alter-worlds, reproduction might be better rethought as politics of redistributing relations, possibilities and futures. #RedistributionsNotReproductions. Making redistributed relations is an extensive, ongoing endeavor, looped with imperfections, messiness, returns and futurities. I am against population and for a politics of differently distributed futures. #DifferentFutures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also:
ON INTERSTELLAR: YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WANTED TO EXPLORE WITH THE INTENT OF INHABITING NEW LAND AND USING ITS RESOURCES? CONQUISTADORS.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT POST-APOCALYPTIC STORIES; WHEN THE APOCALYPSE IS SOLVED THROUGH NATALIST TROPES 

BLA THOUGHT OF THE DAY: WHAT IF ELON MUSK’S ‘RIP HARAMBE’ WAS JUST AN ATTEMPT TO GET DONNA HARAWAY TO NOTICE HIS GIRLFRIEND GRIMES? 

BOOKTUBER TUESDAY – ‘DECOLONIAL SEX AND RELATIONS FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE WORLD – DR. KIM TALLBEAR’

October Roundup: Fall back an hour for fall

Happy Day of the Dead!

Here’s the main highlights from October for the CIRCO blog:


Jesse Eisenberg talks about the footnote. 

Gabbler recommended some things, especially this. 

Commentary on The Martian came out. 

And we reminisced about Harry Potter here. 

 

 

 

Don’t forget to check out our tweets of the week under the Social Medea tab (because why would you follow us on Twitter if you don’t have to?).  Oh, and THE AUTOMATION Vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero Series is free on Goodreads. Start reading now!

 

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.

Jesse Eisenberg and the footnote:

Jesse Eisenberg has a dilemma. He’s in the studio recording the audiobook for his short-story collection, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, and a particularly footnote-laden story isn’t quite working. “My Roommate Stole My Ramen,” which makes up a significant chunk of the book, follows college freshman Harper Jablonski as she writes effusive—and unwanted—letters to her high school guidance counselor. “Do you think it would work better if we didn’t say ‘footnote’ every time?” Eisenberg asks from the glass-walled booth.

Darren Vermaas, the audiobook’s director, weighs in: “To me, the repetitiveness of that is funny. But that’s one man’s opinion.”

His strength is in dialogue and monologue, and in writing miserable characters who alternately compel (like a 9-year-old from a broken home who writes restaurant reviews) and repel (like Harper, the footnote-obsessed freshman Eisenberg lovingly describes as “maladjusted”). “My only B in college was in short fiction, where I tried to describe a tablecloth for five pages,” he explains. “I don’t do that well. I’d rather describe somebody who tripped over a tablecloth and relate it back to some kind of Freudian experience.”

Harper’s story was inspired by tales of his sister’s college-roommate troubles. He suggested she write a blog called “My Roommate Stole My Ramen,” but she never did, so he took the idea back for himself. Harper’s particular writing style came to Eisenberg while he was filming the acclaimed recent biopic The End of The Tour: “I suddenly had this epiphany that she should use footnotes, because David Foster Wallace used footnotes,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what she is. She’s somebody who overexplains everything, and she’s full of rage and vitriol.’ Then everything poured out.” Eisenberg is uncannily good at capturing a specific breed of insincere teen girl. “The Slutnick [Harper’s roommate] is technically a nice person. Like she always says the ‘right’ things, but it feels totally fake.”

Read the rest.

 

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.