viz. - books

Fahrenheit 451 vs. Long Live Books!

Jay Voss — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:40:47 +0000

(Image credit: TILTS)

The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (TILTS) kicks off the 2012-2013 season tomorrow night with a lecture by Nicholson Baker, to be held in Blanton Auditorium at 5:30 PM. It’s open to the public, and all within the Austin area are encouraged to attend. TILTS is an initiative supported by the Office of the President, the Vice-Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of English of The University of Texas at Austin. Each year the symposium brings a group of scholars to campus with the goal of enriching intellectual life in the community, and I can’t say how much I appreciate the program and the extent to which I think it’s an absolute success. Each year the symposium takes on a different theme (“The Digital Human[ities]”, 2010-2011; “Poets & Scholars”, 2011-2012), and this academic year we’ll be hearing about “The Fate of the Book”. Auspiciously titled, no doubt, but certainly relevant. And though advance copy of Nicholson Baker’s speech isn’t circulating (surely this is as important as major politicians’ speeches?), my familiarity with his books suggests that he’s going to be rather optimistic about the fate of print.

(Image credit: Reuters)

I don’t think we could be hearing about “The Fate of the Book” at a better time. Yesterday we woke up to news that there’d been a significant riot at a Foxconn Technology production facility in Taiyuan, China. This plant makes products for Apple, Dell, and Microsoft, and many sources are reporting that the new iPhone 5 has been coming out of the Taiyuan plant. While reports of worker strife in China are always spurious, we do know that at least 5,000 police offers were called in to quell the uprising. It must have been significant. So, I ask, if books are being made obsolete by various tablets and mobile computing technologies, is our convenience worth the price of exploiting poor workers in places like China and Brazil? Read enough books and you’re sure to answer that question in the negative.

On a less urgent and more domestic note, it’s striking how many arguments in the ongoing election cycle are blatantly dependent upon voters’ illiteracy. It’s shocking, really. Assuming that readers of this blog vote for both sides of the spectrum (I know, I know…most of us probably vote left, but pretending for a sec that we live in a vibrant democracy) I’ll quickly give a benign example. Two days ago, at a fundraiser for Todd Akin, Newt Gingrich proclaimed that “My expectation would be that in the crunch, in October, governor Romney is going to be for the entire ticket, and he’s going to be for Todd Akin.” While this does sound like Gingrich’s typical line of argument, he’s telegraphing Republican hopes that Missouri voters will have completely forgotten about Akin’s odd perspectives by Election Day. Democracy’s contingent upon a critical citizenry, and I’d hate to think that Missouri voters could forget about Akin’s remarks in such a short span of time. I happen to think that reading books impedes such apathy and is fundamentally important to the future of a democratic society. It’s clear that digital literacies will be necessary for corporate success in the twenty-first century, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that they will enhance democracy in the same way that traditional literacy did throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

(Image credit: easyvectors.com)

Digital literacies are important for any number of reasons, and it’s an honor that we have the opportunity to teach them in the twenty-first century. These days, anyone with a decent bachelor’s degree should be able to figure out how to use seemingly odd new computing programs, especially if they had no knowledge of how those programs worked previously. That’s the mark of digital literacy, by my measure. But it strikes me as unfair to assume that a digital system could somehow replace books. For one thing, technology remains very expensive. Lower-income homes simply cannot afford Apple products (even if the company does own an aluminum mine, which I’m starting to suspect they do), and I bet that a majority of humans will continue to read books long into the future, so long as they have access to basic education. Aside from economic constraints, most graduate students I know seek out physical books when they wish to do a few days’ worth of serious reading. Half of my own students choose to read physical versions of our text, even though everything is available digitally. In fact, when I’m in the airport, most of the people I see reading digital books are of my parents’ generation.

So, in short, I do feel optimistic about the future of books. It’ll be fun to hear what others have to say throughout the course of this year’s TILTS symposium. If nothing else, I can’t imagine that humans would ever stop telling ourselves stories – that would certainly represent a certain death.

Who said the book was on its way out?

Jay Voss — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: NPR

Who said the book was on its way out? Last week saw the publication of two exciting new volumes. Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography has seemingly been touted in every major news organ, and literary-minded folks are currently devouring Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, fresh off the press. The design of each volume is gorgeous, especially 1Q84, and it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to read these works on an iPad/iPhone or a Kindle. That said, just yesterday Amazon.com announced a lending library for the Kindle, wherein members of Amazon Prime can check out for a limited amount of time any number of 5,000 volumes from an online repository. Who could possibly want to check out IQ84 or the Steve Jobs biography when the physical volumes are so absolutely gorgeous?

Modern lending libraries came about in the eighteenth century when books were expensive (and in Benjamin Franklin's America, sometimes hard to come by). What's the value of Amazon's new lending library for twenty-first century readers? Let’s presume for a moment that one goes to purchase either 1Q84 or the Steve Jobs biography at their local, independent bookseller for $30.50 and $35.00, respectively. (The physical editions go for $16.04 and $17.88 on Amazon.com.) Given that the audio-book versions of these titles run 2,810 minutes and 1,500 minutes, respectively, each minute spent reading these works is worth $0.01 and $0.02. Thus, two hours spent with these books should roughly cost $1.30 and $2.80, and when one considers that a ticket to the latest Hollywood blockbuster will run them upwards of $10, an evening with a fully priced new book is relatively cheap entertainment. Heck, at these rates, a new hardcover book offers a better entertainment value than the latest version of Angry Birds. And, when one considers visual beauty of such new titles as 1Q84 and the Steve Jobs biography, there’s really no reason to read them on a screen that only approximates renderings of the books’ covers.

Image Credit: bbcicecream.com

According to an NPR Fresh Air interview with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs would not agree to interview for the biography project unless, of all things, he had a hand in designing the cover of the book. At the time Jobs made this agreement with Isaacson, the planned cover of the book depicted an Apple logo superimposed with a picture of a younger Jobs, and was titled iSteve. According to Isaacson, when Jobs saw this cover he got “really angry” and said many words that Isaacson did not feel comfortable repeating on Fresh Air. Jobs knew that many more people would see the cover of the biography than actually read it, and for this reason he wanted the cover to make a strong statement. Along with helping Isaacson pick out a photo, Jobs also suggested that the cover be in black and white, and that its cover be glossy.

Image Credit: Amazon.com

Perhaps the most striking thing about the cover of 1Q84 is that the dust jacket is made out of a flimsy onionskin-like paper. Only a week’s worth of reading in your city’s bus or metro system is likely to render your copy’s dust jacket to nothing. The jacket is so thin that images on the boards of the volume are visible underneath. In fact, when one looks at the spine of the book, the 1 and 8 of the title are visible on the dust jacket, and the Q and 4 are visible from underneath the dust jacket. Furthermore, the book's requisite legalese isn’t just restrained to its typical verso, but rather scrolls across the bottom of several pictorial pages in a small font. On the top of these pages run the titles of Murakami’s other works. One doesn’t so much begin 1Q84 as find themselves already immersed in it. This is quite the visual feat, to be sure, and in many ways it’s reminiscent of Murakami’s fiction. For instance, in a seminal New York Times Op-Ed piece from one year ago, Murakami asked, “What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?”

Good questions.

Lolita's Legs and Cover Images

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Movie poster from Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the novel Lolita

Having just finished teaching Lolita again, I find myself thinking about representations of Dolores Haze and of the novel. While my classroom discussions often revolve around how Humbert Humbert depicts her character, I'm interested here in the related issue of how publishers (and movie producers) metonymically depict the work through the image of a girl.

Some potentially NSFW images after the break.

The poster for Kubrick's movie is probably the most famous image of Lolita: red, heart-shaped sunglasses, red lollipop, red lips, and red title. (The image is appropriate: H.H. first sees Dolores Haze sunbathing and wearing sunglasses in a garden; he calls her the reincarnation of his childhood Riviera love.) The poster girl is a seductive stand-in for the movie.We assume Humbert Humbert's gaze and breathe her "nymphean evil" as she manipulates the gentle, shy European professor.

Cover image of Lolita, Random House, 1997

Browse a local book store and this edition is the one we often find (replete with the infamous Vanity Fair quote). From under a pleated skirt a girl's thin, bare legs bow inward in a demure, childish pose. Like the sliver of eyes peering over sunglasses and the red lips, here again we find a double metonymy (or, for purists, a synecdochal metonymy). The young girl's legs represent Lolita's sexual desirability as well as the novel itself. There's no indication of H.H.'s role, his complex mind, or his linguistic acrobatics.

We see the leg motif repeatedly in Lolita covers:

1970s NL Omega, Amsterdam

1991 POL Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warsaw

1995 GB Penguin, London

2001 FR Gallimard (Du monde entier), Paris

2007 POL Muza, Warszawa

All images and publisher information from Covering Lolita

Inhabiting a spectrum of sexuality from the demure to the frankly erotic, each of these images situates desire in a girl's legs. Sometimes she is seductress, at other times innocent prey. This visual motif for illicit desire, however, comes not from the novel. While H.H. does describe Dolly's limbs, he does so in the course of the many anatomical meditations that explore her entire body and which even express a desire to turn her inside out and see her lungs and heart. Indeed, if we might say there are body parts he fetishizes, they would be either armpits or hips, not legs. It is primarily the adult women, with their "thick thighs," whose legs the narrator notices most often.

2000 TAI Xian Jue, Taipei

2005 JAP Shinchosha (PB), Tokyo

Images and publisher information from Covering Lolita

The prevalence, then, of a girl's legs as synecdoche for Lolita-the-girl and metonym for Lolita-the- novel must come from elsewhere. Maybe the publishing houses are simply turning to images that seemed to work well for their predecessors, which appears to be the case for the two above. But these images carry meaning beyond a publisher's reliance on visual cliché. Legs easily differentiate woman from girl and are provocative yet still tame enough not to offend. They simultaneously embody sex and innocence while fragmenting a girl's body into fetishized object.

Still, all these covers leave me dissatisfied. The novel's focus is less the girl than the man who desires and abducts her. H.H.'s eloquently ambiguous narration spends more time conveying his variable moods and rationalizations than describing Dolores Haze. In one respect, however, the images correspond to the contents they cover; H.H. betrays little interest in Lolita as anything other than a desirable body that he catalogues in meticulous detail, piece by piece. Her mind remains a mystery, even though it might contain "a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate" forever forbidden him.

A fairly recent design contest, prompted by the Covering Lolita exhibit, attempted to address this bias toward lollipops and legs. John Bertram, the contest's sponsor, writes:

Nabokov’s work is masterful in its clarity and overflows with powerful and finely-wrought imagery and yet so few of the covers attempt to capture any of this richness, and many of them are merely absurd, or banal or a laughable combination of both.

Here's the winner of the contest:

Image by Lyuba Haleva of Bulgaria

Bertram likes this image because "it really gets at the poetry of the novel. Humbert is transported by Lolita, so the wings are an intriguing choice. Whether they represent Lolita and Annabel Leigh or Lolita the fantasy and Lolita the real person I have no idea. Somehow it all feels right to me and very inspired, and although the typeface is anachronistic and suggests to me a classic European novel, it seems to work.” I have to agree. Unlike the vast majority of extant covers, this one not only blurs fantasy and reality (another prevalent theme of the novel), but also shows the narrator, a figure who is far more central than the girl(s) he desires. The girls are appropriately nymph-like rather than realistic; we see H.H. only in silhouette and as through a veil. His "slippery self" eludes us as it does his own narrative, yet remains indispensable.

Brian Dettmer - Carving New Meanings into/out of Old Books

Megan Eatman — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:34:22 +0000

Libraries of Health and Complete Antique, Brian Dettmer.

H/T to Brian Gatten, Lauren Gantz and NPR

In honor of World Book Day (March 3--but it's not too late to celebrate!) NPR's visual culture blog, The Picture Show, featured work by Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer. Dettmer takes vintage books and carves them into sculptures that, as Mito Habe-Evans explains, "[deconstruct] the linear narrative determined by the structure of the book" and open the door for new interpretations. In giving new life to a supposedly dying medium, Dettmer's sculptures make an argument about the cultural space of physical books, now and in the future.

No title provided on website; Brian Dettmer

While Dettmer himself seems more or less optimistic about the future of books, his art suggests multiple readings. The pieces seem to suggest the incredible possibility of paper as a medium by showing that more can be done with it than we might at first think; however, whether this possibility would translate to continued use of books is unclear. It seems that rendering the human/book relationship as an aesthetic object gives credence to the argument that continuing said relationship is just nostalgia; while the human/book relationship is beautiful, this art suggests that it isn't necessarily practical. Of course, depending on audience, the argument that the human/book relationship is beautiful is in itself enough to justify the continued production of print texts. The relationship would be at least a little different from that you might have with a text you read on your Kindle, but not worse.

Screen capture from Dettmer's website; no title provided

These works also suggest that the physicality of a human/book relationship is part of what individualizes the experience of reading. It is because the books are paper that Dettmer can engage with them in this particular way, producing individualized pieces of art that represent a human/book relationship. Kindles have the mark of mass production; the fact that Dettmer uses vintage books with limited availability gives the appearance of a distinct and special origin. Even if a Kindle can be modified, physically or through programming, to make a piece of art, Dettmer's use of vintage books, which invoke images of the artist searching stores and calling suppliers, suggests that the history behind the pieces, and therefore their messages, will always be fundamentally different.