Shady Characters

“Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding ‘points’ to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses. Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphos evolved into the ‘pilcrow,’ a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text. The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.”

"Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation" - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/?p=279

On Paper Surveillance

An interesting article was just posted reviewing Ben Kafka's recent book The Demon of Paperwork: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. It's interesting in pointing out the bureaucratic nature of writing, and, more importantly its optimistic promise of the power of transparency in making governments accountable. Precisely here, the gordian knot of surveillance and citizenship is tied.

“The hope of some of the French revolutionaries was that paperwork would rationalize the state, that it would depersonalize power and destroy the corrupt networks of aristocratic influence.... While this desire can turn documentation into what Kafka calls a “technology of political representation” by which citizens can track whether the state is serving their interests, it also makes paperwork into a voracious medium that authorizes blanket surveillance of citizens and their reconstitution as vulnerable data sets as a condition of citizenship. You are no one without your permanent file. Part of Kafka’s achievement in The Demon of Paperwork is to show how readily revolutionary optimism is undone by administrative surveillance, even when it’s adopted in the revolution’s name. Revolution promises to wash away the most intractable social problems, but then paperwork rears itself to show that these problems have only been displaced to an impersonal and intractable medium.”

Paperwork Against the People" Dissent - http://bit.ly/Y4vCzZ

On Cursive

“I did also once ask my daughter’s teachers what they thought they were doing by teaching her cursive. When they realised this was not a rhetorical question but a literal one, there was bemusement and panic. “It’s just what we do,” one said. “We always have.” Another ventured the answer I’d anticipated; that the children will be able to write faster, and then added that she thought she’d seen some research somewhere showing that some children find the flowing movements help to imprint the shape of whole words more clearly in their mind. ”

Philip Ball, "Curse of Cursive Handwriting" Prospect - http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=131155

16th Century Kindle

“One of the defining features of Kindles and iPads and their fellow e-readers is their ability to store tons of books in the same place, at the same time. Which means that, thanks to these quintessentially twenty-first-century technologies, we are newly encouraged to consume our books not as long meals, but as occasional snacks: a few nibbles of Moby-Dick here, a few bites of Bossypants there. Under e-readers’ influence, the linear project of book-reading — from page 1 to page 501, sequentially — has shifted to something much more chaotic, much more casual, much more accommodating to whimsy and whim. Literary restlessness, though, dates back much further than the 21st century. It dates back, at least, to the 16th — to the Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, and to his desire for a reading interface that would allow for book-borne snacking.”

"Behold, The 16th Century Kindle," The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/Y4uHzv

Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, via Wikimedia Commons

Kafka on Books

“A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us”

— Franz Kafka

On Jewish Words

“‘[N]o other premodern people,’ Oz and Oz-Salzberger insist, ‘were systematically exposed, in this way, to written texts in their homes across a broad social spectrum.’ At the very least, the primacy of Torah study set Jews apart. For their first 12 or 13 years of life, Jewish children would (and do) listen to their families engage in prayer and tell stories; as soon as they are old enough to do so, they begin to read and memorize prayers and tractates on their own. Upon reaching the appropriate age, children undergo a bar or bat mitzvah, a ceremony that not only anoints them as adults but entrusts them with the ‘textual legacy’ of the Jewish people. In the eyes of Oz and Oz-Salzberger, ‘this piece of social history is […] the single most important fact about the survival of the Jews.’

Then there is the fact that many of Judaism’s most venerated heroes are scholars, sages, and priests. Even King David was a poet. Moses, meanwhile, achieved his eminence not just by leading the Jews to the promised land but by bringing them the Ten Commandments, that most canonical of written texts. Even in their myths, authorship and education offered Jews the surest path to achieving renown. And scholarship, as Oz and Oz-Salzberger convincingly argue, could also be the key to being remembered at all: ‘From late antiquity until early modernity, most of the Jews on historical record are on record because they studied.’”

Jacob Silverman, "Trading Faith for Wonder: On Judaism's Literary Legacy,"  Los Angeles Review of Books - http://bit.ly/V7HrFl

Gutenberg's Ghost

“None of this means that, in the end, e-books won’t come to dominate book sales. My own sense is that they probably will. But, as we enter 2013, I’m considerably less confident in that prediction than I was a few years back, when, in the wake of the initial Kindle surge, e-book sales were growing at 200 or 300 percent annually. At the very least, it seems like the transition from print to electronic will take a lot longer than people expected. Don’t close that Gutenberg parenthesis just yet.”

Nicholas Carr, "Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?" - http://bit.ly/S5FbTl

Culture of Copy

“Libraries should lead the charge in advancing the values of print culture, just as they need to consider the ways that Internet-based information should be archived and preserved. Print media fills in for the vast limitations of Internet media­—serving as its ultimate backup and giving fixity to information. As we drive technology forward, an equally important task is to preserve the best of what’s left behind. We are living in the Internet’s revolutionary generation. The decisions we make now will affect culture for many years to come.”

James Panero, "The Culture of the Copy" - http://bit.ly/S5EQ31

Secret Reading Lives

“‘There’s such an increasing awareness today of nontextual uses of books,’ [Price] says. ‘Now that the textual meaning of books is migrating online, all that’s left is an empty shell.’”

"Secret Reading Lives, Revealed" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/TsxUtw

How we read

“Whereas I don’t believe I have read a single work by a milkman lamenting that most people now buy their milk from a shop instead of having it delivered, books fretting over the death of print form one of the genres of the moment.”

Andrew Martin, "How We Read," Financial Times - http://on.ft.com/T9MR3h

The Art of Google Books

http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/search/hands

Out of Touch

“No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one. Not just reading but reading books was aligned in Augustine with the act of personal conversion. Augustine was writing at the end of the fourth century, when the codex had largely superseded the scroll as the most prevalent form of reading material. We know Augustine was reading a book from the way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to mark his place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was an affirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives of individuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readers into individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of the scroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turn in one’s own life.
In aligning the practice of book reading with that of personal conversion, Augustine established a paradigm of reading that would far exceed its theological framework, one that would go on to become a foundation of Western humanistic learning for the next 1,500 years. It was above all else the graspability of the book, its being “at hand,” that allowed it to play such a pivotal role in shaping one’s life. “Take it and read, take it and read” (tolle lege, tolle lege), repeats the divine refrain. The book’s graspability, in a material as well as a spiritual sense, is what endowed it with such immense power to radically alter our lives. In taking hold of the book, according to Augustine, we are taken hold of by books.”

Andrew Piper, "Out of Touch: E-reading Isn't Reading," - http://slate.me/XOtX6t

For my own comments on this a few years ago, see http://hturt.com/the-kindle-and-the-scroll.html

Loss & Gain

“Soon, however, my pleasure gave way to a melancholy, an unease, and even a slight bitterness. If a book as obscure as La lyre exilée were available online, did it not herald the extinction of the book itself, an article rendered redundant like the goose quills of old or fine sand to dry ink on paper?

If so, why should such an eventuality cause me to grieve? After all, I had felt no particular sorrow at the disappearance of the typewriter. (A film with a scene in a typing pool now strikes us as irresistibly comic, as if all those typists were simpletons or country bumpkins.) Nevertheless, I grew uneasy, like a man who had spent all his life on arcane alchemical studies only to realize towards the end, when it is too late to take up anything else, that scientific chemistry had rendered all his endeavors nugatory: that he had, in fact, devoted his earthly existence to the search for a chimera and frittered his time away on a child’s illusion.”

Anthony Daniels, "The Digital Challenge, I" Loss & Gain, or the Fait of the Book," The New Criterion - http://bit.ly/RTVFIa

Meaning after Data

Just read through an interesting review on digital humanities and the emerging shift from literature to data, by Stephen Marche, "Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities," LA Review of Books,
http://bit.ly/Rs8F7w. Marche, it seems to me, is not against digital humanities as such. Rather his concern is for the hubristic utopianism that pretends that digitisation of data will save the humanities. This relates to my own research on the theological meaning of the codex book at the moment. As Marche puts it:

“Google Books, in its way, represents an even more profound shift than the printing press, because it ends the relationship to the codex which began much earlier, in the fourth century. Binding together texts into portable libraries was one of the original Christian acts. For the Romans, texts were isolated events contained in scrolls. The ferocious squeamishness of hundreds of librarians and writers and scholars who resist this disbinding of literature today isn’t mere self-interest. The end of the book is a kind of sacrilege to them, and they’re not wrong. Cutting open the book is literally a return to the forms and modes of paganism...

...Meaning is mushy. Meaning falls apart. Meaning is often ugly, stewed out of weakness and failure. It is as human as the body, full of crevices and prey to diseases. It requires courage and a certain comfort with impurity to live with. Retreat from the smoothness of technology is not an available option, even if it were desirable. The disbanding of the papers has already occurred, a splendid fluttering of the world’s texts to the winds. We will have to gather them all together somehow. But the possibility of a complete, instantly accessible, professionally verified and explicated, free global library is more than just a dream. Through the perfection of our smooth machines, we will soon be able to read anything, anywhere, at any time.

Insight remains handmade.”

Recently, I've tried to think through the meaning of writing after Derrida, and Lyotard, etc. What's often missed is the strange set of side comments and footnotes that they made on writing itself. As Derrida recognized, this concern for writing goes back to Plato's record of Socrates' aside on the priority of speech (most famously in the Phaedrus). It's as if the need to record and repeat is part of philosophy itself somehow and digital media is the latest radicalisation of this tendency. Radical both in its change, and in its return to the root (radix) of the problem. 

As book historians attest, the codex provided a set of techniques which we developed to make meaning. Pages cut, margins spaced, paragraphs, periods and breaks, all designed to humanise information, aid the memory, and connect us to the infinite abyss poeticized in Gilgamesh all those years ago. And yet, we stand today in a collective amnesia of this history of the book, a blind eroticism of the latest iPhone, or the milliseconds it takes Google to produce its limited results. Little care or concern is voiced for what we are losing in this shift to data. 

"Insight remains handmade," Marche writes. A simple summation of the small side comments and technical reviews, which concern themselves with the digital devices' strain upon our eyes and hands. Will these comments lead to some sense of the ease with which these grim data reepers help or hinder the meaning making work which we linguistic animals must labor to achieve?

Let me be clear, I am not a luddite. My aim is simply to point out the need for ancient humanist techniques and not to leave it to a few tech executives and focus groups at Apple or Google. Just as Nietzsche declared God to be dead, which decried our feeble theologies more than the life of transcendent deities, so too, we must remind people that Steve Jobs is dead. It is not his corpse that should concern us, but the spectre of a single magician who would be responsible for the fragile, finite, human struggle we are in.

Reinventing the Book

“‘I’m finding my literary skills incredibly valuable in software development, which is not something I would have expected. ... My ability to very precisely verbally describe how a reader engages a text, what a reader needs, turns out to be a huge asset in software development.’”

"Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book," The Atlantic, http://bit.ly/SKMSNj

How to make a book disappear

“An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There’s no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers’ websites, to expunge it from a publisher’s online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It’s ugly. For all kinds of reasons.”

http://bit.ly/RKPpSg

How to do things with books

'And how is the value of books changing in an increasingly digital culture in which, depending on how you look at it, print is becoming either less or more valuable? Price suggests that we need to better understand the print “before” against which we position the digital “after”: too often, she argues, “we use idealized printed texts as a stick with which to beat real digital ones” in ways that “flatten the range of uses to which the book was put before digital media.” But as this book shows, the meanings of the book in Victorian Britain were just as diverse as the multiple uses to which books were put. By complicating the two-way distinction of text and book, Price above all suggests that the contemporary binary of print vs. digital is a false dichotomy, one which pushes us towards asking the wrong questions and creating all-too-simple answers. As Price ventures, the most interesting question to ask may be not “what the Victorians felt about the book but why they felt so much.” The same might be said of our feelings towards books – both print and digital – today. Books matter in every sense of the word, and better understanding “how to do things with books” can both enrich our study of the Victorian period and enliven our cultural debates today.'

- "Books Before and After" by Charlotte Mathieson, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/?p=18726

The Footnote

Just saw a brilliant film which links the academic rivalry of two Talmudic scholars to questions about contemporary Israeli national identity. The Footnote was a Best Foreign Film, Academy Award Nominee and winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It portrays a father who has been passed over for the Israel Prize, which had been awarded to his son. Through an erroneous twist of fate the son decides to give up his prize, but fails to conceal his sacrifice from the philological prowess of his father. At the heart of the rivalry between them are a series of inside hermeneutic jokes, biting depictions of academic culture, and subtle reminders about the political romanticism which underwrites the quest to reconstruct the Talmud (and other sacred scripture). It's a clever and touching film, but a particular must see for scholars of ancient near eastern literature and Israeli nationalism alike. One of the most poignant quotes from the film comes from a scene where the son, Prof. Uriel Schkolnik begs the chair of the prize committee to let his father receive the award:

Yehuda Grossman: Uriel, there is no greater betrayal of your father and his principles than what you are asking of me.  In spite of all my criticism of him your father never validated a mistake because it was convenient. You know that.

Uriel Shkolnik: Yes, but he won't.

Yehuda: We will.

Uriel: So what? So what?

Yehuda: It turns the whole system into a circus.

Uriel: No. It means that there are things more important than the truth.

Yehuda: Like what? Family? Like your father, I do know something about cutting corners... about abandoning the truth.

Uriel: Enough! Enough with this truth! So much aggression and violence you hide under the word 'truth'? I don't believe in this romanticism. You don't seek the truth. You seek honours just like other mortals. Such a terrible thing you're doing in the name of truth. It's just a prize. A prize, that's all. It's not a betrayal of anything.It's just a small nice thing you can do for a colleague, if only you'd be a little flexible. Just a tiny bit. That's all I ask of you. That's all.

The Footnote (He'arat Shulayim), 2011, Dir. Joseph Cedar (Interestingly, the Hebrew root, shul of the title He'arat Shulayim, can refer both to the seams on the robes of a priest, as well as to the flabby nether regions of the body; a further cut, it seems to me, at the 'power' of scholarship, HALOT, pg. 1442).

A High Holy Whodunit

"What did Faham know that would cause such a worldwide scandal? Most likely it was that the codex had arrived in Israel nearly whole. Yet only after its arrival did nearly 200 pages disappear. And perhaps it was this secret that led the codex, the most important Jewish book in existence, to not be restored and put on careful display but instead be stored in an iron case in the offices of the Ben-Zvi Institute at Hebrew University."  - http://nyti.ms/OvUP5s

Gideon's Kindle

"The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, is replacing the once-ubiquitious Gideon's Bible with Kindles -- in every one of its 148 rooms -- starting July 16. Travelers looking forward to finding the Bible in the hotel's dresser drawer need not worry, however: The Bible is pre-loaded onto the e-readers from Amazon." - "Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find a Kindle?" http://lat.ms/N8at6h