They walk among us

I finished designing and binding this new book, They Walk Among Us last night. Photos soon.

I'm also working on something called Pheasant Moon, which should print on Tuesday.

Books and reading in future media

A question in the "Collaboration" lecture in the Reith lectures, 2005, asked Lord Broers if he had an idea what the significant developments would be in the first few decades of the 21st century, to which he replied that he was of the opinion that flexible screens and electronic paper would be of importance. The difference in portability and the various ramifications of the changed phenomenology of a computer that behaved in many ways like a book would, one can see, be enormous. My first response was to agree, and to liken the comparison between a bulky laptop computer and a paper thin screen that had some sort of computing power to the difference between a scroll or tablet and a codex.

Codices made the transportation of knowledge possible, in ways
scrolls and tablets never really could: certainly they allowed access
to information more readily, and the storage and cataloguing became
easier. [There is more to say on this subject about the changed
phenomenology of the object (the book, the computer)being studied, and
its reciprocal effect on the reader, as well as the alterations in what
I would call the 'interiority' of the text, by which I mean its powers
of becoming a discrete space, accessible in characteristic ways, and
'thinkable-about' in ways characteristic of books]. Codices, along with
moveable type are the tools needed to produce the gigantic shifts made
possible by the introduction of books to human culture.

While I am unaltered in my agreement that the changes wrought by a
true 'electronic book' would be massive, I now wonder what the effect
of a networked, open and literally rather than seemingly limitless book
would be. One would lose the sense of enclosure, the satisfaction of
closure in the works one read. While it's true that it would still be
possible to read uninterrupted works, the mere possibility of explicit
ruptures, links and shifts in the text at the level of the medium one
was reading in, would tend, I think, to militate against the
introspection, the meditation, of reading. Books have a sense of
privacy, of inviolability. One that is transgressed, of course, in
various fictional forms, and one which is certainly an illusion, the
meaning of the work and the language it is expressed in being a mere
suspension in the larger culture- in this way the borders of the book
are actually illusory. But it is a strong illusion, and it is, I think,
one of the prime enjoyments of reading that it is, for a while, a
private estate of discourse. We know this from the web- reading here is
not the same as reading from a book in one's room, on one's own, and in
one's own time. Could electronic paper approach this? Or would its very
elasticity, its very capacity, bring us into new ways of reading? And
what might these new ways of reading be? It is easy to criticise
web-surfing for its impatience, its superficiality, its lack of seemly
gravitas. It is more difficult to pin down how reading actually takes
place, what 'serious' electronic reading (for want of a better phrase)
might be about. It is similar to our more familiar notions of reading
and the reader, but different, and it takes into account the vertigo of
openness that digital reading offers (the reader's exposure, if
you will, to borrow a mountaineering term). It has a more widely-spread
awareness, to be sure, but it can focus keenly on individual pieces,
all the while critically disarming the work in question of any claims
to being the last word, always wondering, in fact, if there isn't more
to it.

I find myself trying to think about this notion of digital reading
in terms of temporary atttention-sets, temporary holdouts against an
all-collapsing relativism. It's a struggle to make a meaningful
comparison between the iconic figure of the traditional reader, and
whatever the image of this new activity might be. To do this I would
need a language of what the reader absorbs from the book, and how the
reader is in turn absorbed in the book, and I would need to expose
these imageries of inside and outside to the effects of the continually
shifting boundaries of digital media.

points of reference: novels

a list of possible points of reference to the research outside the usual academic spectrum

w.Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

Jorgé Luis Borges: The Library of Babylon

www.bibliomysteries.com has some links of interest.

also...

snip:

Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life,
which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you
don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed
library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life,
which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you
don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed
library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....snip

programme of work

ideas and notes towards a programme of work

the life of the book

an ideas parking lot. buzzwords and notes for a short essay I want to write.

Circulate/recur/preserve

catalogue/vicinity/serendipity (discrete and not discrete)

review

digitize

handling / physical preservation

travelling (Wesley)

promulgation, multiplicity (media history...printing)

loss- burning, disposing, crumbling, forgetting, collections split

found- secret

opened and closed

collected/enjoyed/hated/abused/reverenced

dreaming/ interiority

editions, relations

1001 nights

mythic/quasi mythic- calvino

world's first inflatable pub!

The world's first inflatable pub. (www.airquee.co.uk)
And people think a new Pope's big news. Perhaps this could be used to bring much-needed relief to publess parts of the world?

today's meeting

I just posted a little voodoopad wiki of my recent meeting with my PhD supers:

link

It seemed the right way to capture it: my notes were really a mindmap style thing, but since the java that runs Freemind, the mindmapping software I use, is such a pain in the arse, I've gone with this instead.

long haul

Holy moly.

I got a surprise from Flickr today. I was bemoaning my losses when Flickr announced their acquisition by Yahoo a while back, in particular the possibility that I had lost money by choosing to update my account just before the announcement. But now they're telling me I'm getting double what I paid for:

"1. Double what you paid for!

Your original 3 year pro account has been doubled to

6 years, and your new expiry date is Oct 1, 2010."

2010. I suppose I'll get used to having it around by then. I wonder how many photos I'll have by that time? 12000 or so? More?

site redesign

screenshot, originally uploaded by aesop.

I've redesigned the front page of my website to make it easier for me to include new material from time to time. It's not a full redesign- many elements are the same, and many pages are unaffected, but it harmonises more with adminicle now. The main point is that I will now be able to include new material in the front page much more easily.

fallen branch

fallen branch, originally uploaded by aesop.

on the path between Queensferry and Cramond.

A new technique has opened up a massive hoard of classical writings:

Quoted from The Independent, 17 April, 2005. Story by David Keys and Nicholas Pyke

 

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in
equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it
could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of
finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed
infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus
Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies,
tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to
make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by
Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient
world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find
lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the
time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish
dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye -
decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But
scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from
satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view.
Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per
cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in
existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of
Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have
been speculating about for centuries".

Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of
University College London, now head of classics at the University of
Michigan, said: "Normally we are lucky to get one such find per
decade." One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet
Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as
"invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of
Classics campaign.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

This is really astonishing, a vast new piece of our cultural inheritance, and one whose repercussions will reach far beyond classical studies, spawning interpretation and studies in all the other arts and subtly modifying the cultural ground beneath our feet. It's also a chance for us to examine our criticism; what we find out about these texts over the next few years will say a lot about what our cultural climate is capable of and what we make of our heritage. Will today's classical researchers and interpreters make good use of this material?

idiot me

I spent ages last night preparing for a meeting I thought was this morning. Turns out it's tomorrow. Which is annoying because I could really have done with a bit of a break last night. Still, leastways I get to have another look at things.

pheasant

pheasant (cropped version), originally uploaded by aesop.

Rosebery estate

cartridge, originally uploaded by aesop.

Cartridge, discovered on the Rosebery estate near Edinburgh. L and I visited recently, for just a couple of days, trying to pack in a whirlwind tour of Edinburgh. We managed this walk on the shore of the Firth of Forth, which was certainly a highlight. On the way we found this cartridge for pigeon shot.

moon drawing

moon drawing, originally uploaded by aesop.

A drawing I did some time ago, posted now in honour of this afternoon's meeting at Spike Island to talk about integrating my book arts teaching into the taster class they are organising across-the-board in August. Also in honour of Howard Plotkin's The Imagined World Made Real, a marvellous book that attempts to "marry the biological and social sciences". Fiercely attentive to critics that would accuse him of reductive reasoning that would throw the study of centuries of socil science, he sets out the landscape of these relationships and explanatory models with great emphasis on the detail and strangeness of culture. He's equally attentive to the necessity of using the explanatory powers of science to understand culture. One would expect the usual criticisms to hold true: clumsy, reductive, overly rational. Not so.

Very provoking, opening avenues of inference and speculation deep into my own thought on artistic practice and media.

new essay

I've this minute sent off a new essay/statement piece, trying to set out the anatomy of the question I'm working on in my PhD. I'm still raking too much in, but parts of it seem to be coagulating into tractable bits and pieces. Or perhaps this is an illusion.

This is it:

Download heuristics3.doc

mossy drystane wall

mossy drystane wall, originally uploaded by aesop.

Hooray!

I'm off work (from the library) for a while now and I'll be heading off up to edinburgh with L for a few days, in honour of which, (for some reason) this photo of a drystane wall.

roofspace, Bristol library

roofspace, Bristol library, originally uploaded by aesop.

at the library taking photos today.

library stairs

library stairs, originally uploaded by aesop.

monoprints

the creature, originally uploaded by aesop.

There are yet more monoprints on their way to Ale and Porter to replace the ones which sold out. I haven't long to sell these ones, but hey.

Ludo going home

Ludo going home, originally uploaded by aesop.

On the way home my MP3 became irreperably broken. I say "became' because it was safely nestled in my pocket one moment, the next, the power stud had gone, retreated entirely within the tough metal casing. I suspect many an MP3 player with a shoddier outer has got a better fit of the inside to the outside. Damn thing always was shoogling about within.

I'm angry at it/about it just now and don't ever want to see it again, much less argue with people in Korea about my guarantee. I'm going to pretend it never existed.

Marbling shadows

Marbling shadows, originally uploaded by aesop.

back to the library again tomorrow. Finally finished the library plans project, now ready for printing.

also over at Ale and Porter. i got paid for the various things that have sold, and it'll almost pay for the next month's fees at college, which probably works out at about £100/hour or something. Sigh.
I did another 42 monoprints, though, so I've been a busy cynic, at least. Forgot to take my camera though. Duh.

toast flag

toast flag, originally uploaded by aesop.

I've been toasting.

flickr doesn't seem to be working. I'd love to know if this was likewise for anyone else with a Mac. Blind Sam?

UPDATE- seems fine now.