I just finished reading Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and yes, there’s no way to make that sound like I’m not making a joke. But I was thinking about reading conference reports for events that I haven’t attended.

It’s too tempting to take quick conference blog posts (or worse, Twitter posts) at face value, and assume that

• what was reported is actually what was said;
• the person who said it belives it; and
• the person who reported it appoves of the sentiment.

None of that is necessarily true. So it’s tempting to decide simply not to comment at all. I know that Walt Crawford tries to do that.

But thinking about the ideas in Bayard’s book, I realize that I need not be so circumspect. In the context of of a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, Bayard sums up Wilde’ point this way:

Criticism is the record of a soul, and that soul is its deep object, not the transitory literary works that serve as supports for that quest. (176)

As with criticism, so too, I would argue, with the blog post, or the presentation.

So let’s talk about the “Dead Technology” session at Computers in Libraries earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure who presented. I don’t really know what they said. But the mere existence of such a panel prompted people to create their own lists of dead tech and have their own arguments online, and it also prompted people to second-guess the technologies that were reported by eyewitnesses. You can sample the #deadtech hashtag on Twitter, or read a fairly interesting FriendFeed thread kicked off by Meredith asking “Help! Need clever/funny examples of dead tech for Marshall Breeding. Anyone?”

But just as you don’t need to have seen this panel to say something about it, the technology doesn’t have to be “dead” for you to bring it up at this panel, and neither does the “deadness” of the technology ensure that it is interesting or appropriate to talk about.

Velcro as seen through a scanning electron microscope.

In that FriendFeed thread, people really picked up on Meg vs. Meg’s suggestion of “velcro.” It seemed to drive people nuts that they use velcro every day, but that someone would have the temerity to suggest that it is a dead technology. I’d say that Meg was exactly right. Velcro’s ubiquity proves that it is dead. When every kid has a yard of velcro on his shoes, backpack, and jacket, is that still a “technology?” Is it something that you have to maintain? Is it a feature that sells a product? Are we waiting to buy this velcro product because we hear that there will be better velcro released next month? It’s no longer technology; it is lint.

Of course, if you wanted to take something that was undeniably dead and talk about it, you’d have to go a different direction. How about microcard? I doubt there are many librarians who would argue that microcard still has much life left in it. So it’s boring to talk about unless you can show why we should care that it is dead. You could talk about how in 1944, Fremont Rider devoted an entire book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library: A Problem and Its Solution, to a passionate case for microcards. You could talk about where that solution took us and how it informs what we think today. Lastly, you could talk about how a current-day technology that looks very much alive is actually rotting from the inside, and likely to take us the way of the microcard. I wonder if that’s what the speaker was getting at who said the iPad was dead tech.

Anyone can pick a technology out of the hat and say that it is “dead.” What is interesting is what happens after that–can they make you care why it is dead? Can they make you mourn that dead technology, or swear to avenge it? That’s what the dead tech panel is about.

Addendum

If the whole idea of “dead technology” is interesting to you, let me recommend two books, one of which I have read and one of which I haven’t (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is which.)

Carolyn Marvin’s 1988 book, When Old Technologies Were New is a fascinating look at how people reacted to an assimilated new technologies in the late 1800s. It examines issues of class, art, work, and public discourse in the age when the electric light, telephone, phonograph and even the idea of an “electrician” were new and untamed.

A great companion to Marvin’s book is Klaus Musmann’s Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: An Anecdotal History. He covers some of the same ground as Marvin, in looking at technologies like the electric light and the telephone, but in this case how they specifically were seen to relate to libraries and library work. His book documents a world where librarians are not technological innovators, but are restlessly reactive, forever adopting and adapting technologies.

Today, though, I’m mostly interested in the cover (this copy is from the collection of the University of Denver). The cover’s Schedl illustration from 1964…

Looks an awful lot like Tutt Library, where I work, here seen in a photograph from the Colorado College Archives. I can’t be sure, but I think this is from around the time the library opened in 1962.

The library of tomorrow, yesterday!

So I wrote a book. The experience of writing the book–even a pretty short, straightforward book like this one–was far more difficult than I expected it would be, so you might imagine that it would make seeing it finished to be that much more rewarding.

I really don’t expect individuals to buy the book, because it’s priced for libraries. But if you have the authority to spend money on librarian’s professional development books, you could find worse uses for your money than the ten books in the series, The Tech Set. I’m happy to be listed alongside such witty, accomplished, and attractive people as the other authors on that list.

Lastly, if you are reading this blog post, there is a strong chance that I thanked you in the acknowledgements, either by name or by implication. So take a look below, and thank you again.

In honor of Andromeda Klein and Madame Sosostris, I’m breaking out my Tarot deck this April. It’s a Rider/Waite deck, so Andromeda would certainly approve. Like Andromeda, I didn’t have time to do a full Celtic Cross this morning, so I just thought about the day ahead and counted out ten cards to see what the resolution or outcome would be. I wasn’t thrilled when I found out.

The Ten of Swords doesn’t look like the happiest card to find in that position. Let’s see what Arthur Edward Waite, designer of this deck and Adromdeda’s imaginary pal has to say about it:

Yeah, I probably should have just stayed in bed. As a bonus, the card in position eight was the Two of Swords, a card that figures prominently in Adromeda Klein (seen here in the Eight Bit Tarot version.)

Finally, for a capsule review of Andromeda Klein, I’ll say that it took a long time to get going and get out of Andromeda’s head for any length of time, though perhaps that kind of hermeticism is part of the point. The last hundred pages or so are more what I hoped for from the book as she tries to negotiate a complicated tangle of relationships with those present, departed, and mystical. Despite some mixed feelings, it’s obviously a book that has stuck with me after I finished it, and I expect the character of Andromeda to be a mental companion for years to come.

Finally-finally, the Andromeda Klein theme song! (That’s what you get when your creator, Frank Portman, sings for a punk band when he’s not writing YA books.)

Edit: Ha! I just realized that–according to the jacket of Andromeda Klein– the book that Andromeda’s friend, Daisy, used to hide her tarot deck is none other than Portman’s first novel, King Dork. There are fragments from pages on the back cover, and the page showing through just a bit on the front cover behind the cards is page 301 of King Dork. Neat.

His death reminded me of a little project I had thought about in the fall. What if lots of people took a photograph of different copies of the same book? Individually the photos would be sure to be boring, but as a group, would the relentless repetition and variation make for a complex, textured, mesmerising whole?

And what should the book be? It should be a book that was in virtually every library in the USA. A book that most literate people were familiar with, whether they had read it or not.

I wanted to choose a book that would have a lot of associations and resonances for people, but that wouldn’t be too loaded, like the Bible. I thought of classics like Moby Dick or Hamlet, both of which would still be interesting. But those have been published in so many variations that I worried there would be not enough reptition.

So I hit on The Catcher in the Rye. It has several iconic covers: the original and re-issued cover with the red carousel horse; the solid maroon Bantam paperback with the gold type (so wonderfully parodied by the cover of Frank Portman’s King Dork); the white Little, Brown cover with the rainbow stripes in the corner. And of course many other less familiar covers.

But the idea isn’t to get single, “ideal” photos of these covers. The idea is to get portraits of individual copies of The Catcher in the Rye complete with evidence of reading, library stickers, stamps, covers torn or pristine.

So here’s what I’d like you to do. Grab as many copies of The Catcher in the Rye as you have available. Your own copy, library copies, friends’ copies, whatver. Take photos of the covers. Like the photos illustrating this post, the pictures should look like mug shots: just the book cover, square in the frame, with a little of the table or floor or whatever behind it. Please don’t get creative. If the photo looks kind of boring, you are doing it right. Crop it, get the color and sharpness right, and you are ready to submit it (or just submit it).

To submit, please add your “mugshot” photo–one photo per copy, please–to the Flickr Group Catcher in the Rye Census, LSW. Give it a Creative Commons license, either “Attribution” or “Attribution–Share Alike” (see Flickr’s instructions if you don’t know how to do that). I’m not sure what the end product will be, but I don’t want to have to ask everyone individually for permission . If you have time and inclination, tell us a bit about that copy in the description. If you couldn’t help but take other non-cover-mugshot photos, link to them in the description.

I’m very curious to see what we get when we have hundreds of images of the “same” book in one place.

We asked students to sample at least five online works from Jessy’s page on Netcessary literature and then we looked at a handful in class, mostly chosen by students who had something to say about them. Our group was pretty well split on Felix Jung’s First Snow with some people finding it gimmicky–using multimedia to dress up a weak text–while others found it at least intriguing or successful on its own terms. The class was more complimentary about Jessy’s own work, A Letter from Henry. (And I should mention that the students mentioned Jessy’s work first–she didn’t bring it up.)

Back in special collections, we looked at dozens of examples of artists’ books and fine press books, from fairly straightforward (if beautiful and lavish) books, such as Stuart Klipper’s A City as Once Seen, recently published by the Press at Colorado College, to Soap Story, an artists’ book by Angela Lorenz where the pages of the book are printed on cloth and encased in soap.

Now I need to make my own thoughts about manuscript and early printed books more coherent so I can talk about them tomorrow.

One of the things we asked them to do last night was to participate in a very old internet meme. We had them read John Scalzi’s 15 Things About Me and Books and then post their own 15 things to the couse website.

I can’t show you their posts, but I thought I might as well show you mine:

1. I had a fight with my girlfriend in college when she borrowed a book from me (Romeo and Juliet, I believe) and returned it dog-eared.
2. I remember looking at the books on the spinning display in my elementary school library, especially ship on the cover of “The Voage of the Dawn Treader” and especially especially “The Dragon’s Handbook” which had green pages and which I checked out repeatedly.
3. The illustrations for the book “Pick a Peck of Puzzles” freaked me out so badly as a kid, I think I had to hide the book from myself.
4. Like Scalzi, I burned a class text once (“David Copperfield.”) Unlike Scalzi, I don’t feel too bad about it.
5. I used to read books on my Palm Pilot while walking to CC from home.
6. I watched a co-worker steal a book when I was still a pretty new employee at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstore. He advised me “when you have your review with a manager and they ask what you like about working here, don’t say ‘free books.’”
7. I’m not usually someone who says he likes the smell of books, but I recall the smell of a Latin Bible printed by Nicolas Jenson on vellum in 1476 which I thought was the most beautiful book at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
8. I’m not much of a book collector, but I have a small collection of career books for girls about being a librarian.
9. I bought a copy of Plato’s Dialogues at a library sale when I was in elementary school. I didn’t know a thing about Plato, and never really read any of it, but I liked the fact that it looked old and had a green leather spine.
10. I wish we had a better term than “graphic novel” for big, thick, “respectable” comics. Very few of them are novels. I love all kinds of comics.
11. My Northwestern University roommate and I checked out all the books by journalist/memoirist/kinda hokey guy/Northwestern alumnus Bob Greene in the NU library, and my roommate took them to a signing where a puzzled Greene inscribed them.
12. My first full-time library job was in interlibrary loan at the University of Delaware library. I used to have a file with photocopies of the covers or title pages of the strangest books that passed through my hands there. I can’t find it, but a few I remember are: “My Life With the Microbes”; “Atlas of Avoidable Death”; “Crimson Steel” which had a disclaimer on the back cover releasing the publisher from responsibility if you injured yourself while even just reading the book.
13. Buying books every quarter was probably my favorite part of college.
14. I once gave the OK to discard an old reference set that was a German etymological dictionary of French. A few months later I got an email from Owen Cramer: “I can’t find Wartburg anywhere. What have we done!”
15. I have two sons, ages 4 and 7. I was talking to them about our class over dinner tonight and asked them if the audio books they liked to listen to are “books” or not. Mr. 4 said yes, because someone is reading the book to you. Mr. 7 said no, because first, they aren’t really reading to you, and second a recording of someone reading a book is not also a book. I agree with them both.

I asked her if she’d be interested in team-teaching a course at the College during the January half-block two-week term on the history and future of the book. Together, Jessy and I decided to pitch something that would encompass a quick immersion in the history of the book, along with investigation of the current state of books and reading and speculation about where trends would take us in the future. We wanted to emphasize getting students’ hands on books in special collections and having them, if possible, set type themselves.

Over the past seven years, we found some sympathetic ears in our Director and a professor or two. The Press at Colorado College has come roaring back to life. The College has a new thematic minor in “The Book.” And tomorrow, Jessy and I begin teaching our two week class. Here’s a slightly redacted version of the syllabus.

I’m tremendously excited and not a little bit nervous. We had more than 20 students signed up, but have been told to expect that number to fall as students realize they’d rather not take a January course. I’m sure our plans aren’t perfect, and the topic is so big that I keep thinking of things that we are neglecting to cover. But I’m happy with where we are starting from, and I’m very curious to see where the students take it.

As the class progresses, I hope to be able to share on this blog some of what I’m learning as I teach. At the same time, expect that I won’t be around a whole lot on IM or FriendFeed or the like.

Here’s to trying new things in 2010.

Guess who’s library owns El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos : espacio, cuerpo y poder by Sergio Rivera-Ayala? I just checked, and no, I was not the one who ordered it.

(If you are wondering why this is funny, see this post and this other post.)]]> http://stevelawson.name/seealso/archives/2009/11/outflanked.html/feed 6 http://stevelawson.name/seealso/archives/2009/05/infinite_summer_read_infinite_jest_with_a_few_thousand_pals_this_summer.html http://stevelawson.name/seealso/archives/2009/05/infinite_summer_read_infinite_jest_with_a_few_thousand_pals_this_summer.html#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 17:58:08 +0000 Steve http://stevelawson.name/seealso/?p=17715 You all know that I’m a David Foster Wallace fan. So I love the idea of Infinite Summer (via Waxy):

The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009

You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

They say they’ll have more info at that site on June 1, and you can also hook up with the obligatory Twitter account and Facebook group.

I read the book when it first came out, and it had a big effect on me. I’m hesitant to recommend it to people because Wallce seems like a love-him-or-hate-him kind of author. Plus, you know, 1,000+ pages, tons of endnotes, etc. But assuming I finish Moby Dick by June 21, I might be in on this. I’d like to revisit The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, the Eschaton, Madame Psychosis, and The Entertainment, and reading it along with thousands of other people could be a fun way to do it. Plus, this is just the kind of low-overhead mass-participation project I love.