You know when you’re reading an author, and you get the sense you could reach across time and space, and shake their hand? Like if you met them in the street, or in a shop queue, you could talk to them, and get on famously, and not run out of things to talk about, because you would talk about books, and the reading of them, and the treasure of their stories. (Other writers I feel this way about: Gabriel Josipovici; and Yevgeny Kharitonov, sending up his own little fireworks in a locked room.)

Like Kharitonov, Krzhizhanovsky was banned from publication in his own lifetime, but through the kindness of NYRB Classics and the generosity of Joanne Turnbull’s translation, we can read him now. And so I excerpt thus, from the story “The Bookmark”:

The other day, as I was looking through my old books and manuscripts tied tight with twine, it again slipped under my fingers: a flat body of faded blue silk and needlepoint designs trailing a swallowtail train. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time: my bookmark and I. Events of recent years had been too unbookish and had taken me too far from those cabinets crammed with harbariumized meanings. I abandoned the bookmark between lines as yet unread and soon forgot the feel of its slippery silk and the delicate scent of printing ink emanating from its soft and pliant body wafered between the pages. I even forgot… where I had forgotten it. Thus do long sea voyages part sailors from their wives.

True, books had crossed my path here and there: rarely at first, then more often; but they did not read bookmarks. These were travelling signatures glued pell-mell into crookedly cut covers; along the rough and dirty paper, breaking ranks with the lines, brown-gray letters—the colour of military broadcloth—rushed; these reeked of rancid oil and glue. With these crudely produced bareheaded bundles, one did not stand on ceremony: shoving a finger in between the sloppily pasted signatures, one tore the pages apart the better to leaf through them, tugging impatiently at the raggedy, tooth-edged margins. One consumed these texts posthaste, without reflecting or delectating: both books and two-wheeled carts were needed then strictly to supply words and ammunition. The one with the silk train had no business here.

And now again: the ship was in port, its gangway down. Library ladders scanning the spines of books. The statics of frontispieces. Silence and green reading-room lampshades. Pages rubbing against pages. And, finally, the bookmark: just as it had been, all that time ago— except that now the silk was even more fade, and its needlepoint design covered in dust.

I pulled it out from under a paper mound and placed it in front of me—on the edge of the desk; the bookmark looked affronted and slightly grumpy. But I smiled at it with warmth and affection: to think of all the voyages we had taken together—from meanings to meanings, from this set of signatures to that. Now, for instance, I recalled our difficult ascent from ledge to ledge of Spinoza’s Ethics—after almost every page I had left my bookmark alone, squeezed between the metaphysical layers; then the breathlessness of Vita nova where, at passages linking one poem to the next, my patient bookmark had often to wait until the emotion that had taken the book out of my hands subsided, allowing me to return to the words. And I couldn’t help remembering… But all of this concerns only the two of us, me and my bookmark: I’ll stop.

Especially as it is important in practice—since any encounter obligates—to repay the past given us with some bit of the future. In other words, rather than tucking the bookmark away at the book of the drawer, I should include my old friend in my next reading; instead of a series of memories, I should offer my guest another bundle of books.

And Krzhizhanovsky’s discourse on the bookmark, and the process of reading, like a long journey (Sinclair’s walks, or Josipovici’s opposite of bicycling), reminded me of another piece of writing, that I had to hold in my head all day, and spend an hour tracking along the shelves, retracing those old journeys, back a decade to a dog-ear I had left in another house, another time, on another trip.

Albert Hourani, in his History of the Arab Peoples, quotes a legal and medical scholar of Baghdad, ‘Abd al-Latif (1162/3—1231), on the scholar as one of the ideal types of man. I copied it out then, in that house, and have done so again, now. Here you go:

I commend you not to learn your sciences from books unaided, even though you may trust your ability to understand. Resort to professors for each science you seek to acquire; and should your professor be limited in his knowledge take all that he can offer, until you find another more accomplished than he. You must venerate and respect him… When you read a book, make every effort to learn it by heart and master its meaning. Imagine the book to have disappeared and that you can dispense with it, unaffected by its loss… One should read histories, study biographies and the experience of nations. By doing this, it will be as though, in his short life space, he lived contemporaneously with peoples of the past, was on intimate terms with them, and knew the good and bad among them… You should model your conduct on that of the early Muslims. Therefore, read the biography of the Prophet, study his deeds and concerns, follow in his footstep, and try your utmost to imitate him… You should frequently distrust your nature, rather than have a good opinion of it, submitting your thoughts to men of learning and their works, proceeding with caution and avoiding haste… He who had not endured the stress of study will not taste the joy of knowledge… When you have finished your study and reflection, occupy your tongue with the mention of God’s name, and sing His praises… Do not complain if the world should turn its back on you, it would distract you from the acquisition of excellent qualities… know that learning leaves a trail and a scent proclaiming its possessor; a ray of light and brightness shining on him, pointing him out…

In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, “A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. “The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. “The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”

— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

I’ve just started reading Free Culture (yup, on my phone), and it’s really good. If, like me, you’re very into all this CC-licensing and democratisation of content, but don’t actually know too much about the legal, historical and cultural background, you should give it a try too.

The above quote seemed startlingly appropriate to much of booktech and the wider internet’s attempts to do cool, new things and do them now. The results aren’t always pretty, but they’re often thrilling, and groundbreaking, and point the way to more exciting and new things. Of course, “terrible and wonderful” is not a good pitch to anyone corporate, which is why it’s taking the big guys a long time to turn the boat around.

But not, of course, Penguin. Head over to wetellstories.co.uk and check out the first installment of their six web-based tales, a Google Maps-based adventure from Charles Cumming. Sure, I’m not wild about aspects of the interface (the neophobes should have a field day with all the ‘reticulating splines’) but this is about as new and exciting as it gets.

However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more. Beyond that it is nothing. Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work.

On Tuesday morning, I witnessed a very entertaining debate between Bill Thompson and Dr Nick Baylis at iDesign London. Entertaining because Bill Thompson is a shameless cheerleader for social (and most other) technologies, whereas Dr Baylis believes that technology (or rather, the uses to which we put technology, although he wasn’t very clear on this) are making us unhappy and ill.

Dr Baylis soon emerged as a book-pusher of the Andrew Keen mould, and was easily seen off, although not before revealing his patent lack of research in the subject – his unfounded belief that relationships begun on the internet were doomed to fail was particularly ridiculous, and actually rather offensive to a number of those present. Lloyd’s thoughts on Keen are applicable here too: you get out of technology what you put in, and on Tuesday I saw a very morose psychotherapist telling a roomful of very optimistic tech-lovers that they were wrong…

Anyway, one of the thoughts that came after the debate concerned the perceived distancing effects of technology and, to a lesser extent, of reading. When I was younger, kids who spent too much time on computers were presumed to be lonely and socially awkward – likewise, kids who spent too much time reading, although there was at least an intellectual air to that endeavour. As computers have become joined up, we’ve come to see technology as a connector, and while many of the old stereotypes prevail, most of us now recognise the social qualities of technology.

Reading, however, as largely remained an individual, solitary, even solipsistic activity, and it struck me that what many are resisting in the increasing digitisation and socialisation of literature is not the technology itself, but the erosion of that particular experience of literature. Reading a novel is one of the last ‘disconnected’ activities, and as we move it ever more into the connected world, we must ensure we don’t lose those qualities, of rest, respite, and introspection, that make it valuable.

The opening quote is from Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, who had some interesting things to say about writing and reading. Possibly.

A short story for you, in a different form.

I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message – providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message.

I’d like to see one on a book cover, or chalked on a wall. I might print this one out and paste it around town…

[ No idea what's going on? Here you go. ]

[ More info on the story. ]

The video is a product of BET, the ‘black interest’ US cable channel, who deserve utter praise for such a forthright and downright hilarious approach. It has, quite predictably, caused a bit of a furore across the pond due to it’s supposed negative stereotyping of black youth. It’s satire. It has a message. People will get the message. Acting on it is up to them. (Via Print Is Dead).

Whichbook.net is such a good idea it’s surprising it hasn’t been shamelessly copied elsewhere. You move a set of sliders and get recommendations from UK library catalogues.

The selection shown in the image above (there are many categories, but you can only set 4) got me Paul Golding’s Senseless (“Be warned, this is an extremely frank account of homosexual practices. But it is also the most moving love story full of humour, sadness and despair.”) and there’s a link to borrow it from your local library.

Apparently, “books are read by one of a team of 150 people who are drawn from libraries and literature organisations and are specially trained to create the entries” – an excellent but probably pretty slow process which likely explains why it hasn’t caught on. But with the general ineptitude of search at places like Amazon, public distrust of sponsored “If you like this, you’ll love…” type promotions, and the hard work required to get LibraryThing-type services to work for you, it does seem like a winner.

The only downside is that it’s not very well executed – the site is horribly Flash-y and full of nasty pop-ups and ‘click here’ links that don’t work – but you can’t have everything.

Whichbook.net is a Lottery-funded project of Opening The Book, with a similarly disastrous line in Web Design. Despite claiming accessibility, it really isn’t – huge swathes of text are obscured by Flash images, and it doesn’t validate, not in XHTML or even CSS. For a modern, cutting-edge (supposedly) library provider, it’s a depressingly poor example – must try harder.

[Update 8/07: after I contacted Opening The Book, they removed the false 'Valid XHTML' claim from their pages, but claimed they were accessible. Their site is still borked in my Firefox view.]

A recent literary event provided a chance for an extended chat with various people about the possibilities for new types of readings. I’ve always thought they’re a bad way to appreciate lit, but they’re valuable in promoting new work, and bringing together like-minded people. What can we do about this?

Readings can, of course, be very good – when the author knows how to read their work, knows their audience, and communicates with them well, as was the case last week. They can also be hideously bad – straining to hear an author struggling to bring to life a narrative written to be read quietly to oneself, not out loud to a group. There’s also an element of buttonholing, particularly at multiple-author readings, reminiscent of support bands at big gigs trying to make themselves heard, and the resentment that bubbles up when one such reader goes on too long or picks the wrong passage to declaim.

The market for readings essentially arises from a rock star attitude to authors – that the quality of writing is enhanced by hearing it from the writer’s own lips, with the additional possibility of cross-questioning them and getting a signed copy after. Nothing I’ve ever seen or heard has made me support this view, despite occasionally enjoying evenings with authors who do know how to read their work. Likewise, Q&A’s are better served by informed, moderated discussion than hurried ‘any questions?’ when the requisite period of appreciative hush has been allowed to pass. Signings, I’m afraid, continue to mystify me, so I’m just going to ignore that aspect of the proceedings.

What I have always found most rewarding about readings are the conversations they evoke around the work in question, and the opportunity to meet others who appreciate it, which in turn is likely to lead one to new literary discoveries. Is there a way to present the work to groups who’ve gathered for the purpose, and maintain the significance of author presence, without the false construction of the author reading?

The simplest way would be to simply provide photocopied pages to the audience, and allow them to read the sample in their own time, although this seems reductive, and somewhat like a set text from an English lesson. I quite like the idea of projecting the text onto the walls of the venue, letting it scroll slowly upward, allowing attendees to engage and disengage at will, to dip into the text or become absorbed in it. Someone else suggested the possibility of more private readings – a discreet tap on the shoulder and the author whispers a few passages into your ear before moving on: more suitable to some texts than others. The challenge is to strike a balance between the traditional author-centred reading, and the reader-centred book group, and to allow new dialogues to emerge between both parties.

With the recently-announced inaugural London Literature Festival looming, booktwo.org and 3:AM are thinking of planning some alternative events on its fringes, possibly incorporating some of these ideas. If you have some thoughts on this, do share.

Photo of Jenny Holzer’s For London from Phil Gyford‘s Flickr stream, reproduced under Creative Commons license.

With new technology comes the need to rethink certain conventions. The above is clipped from a Macmillan ebook (link), and while I don’t wish to do anyone in particular down, and the technology is young, I think it speaks to a disparity in the understanding of ebooks: they are not simply paper books, scanned page by page and uploaded – or at least, they have the potential to be so much more.

Does anyone know, for instance, if there has been any research done into the difference in reading quality between pages and scrolls – that is, documents which fit the window, and are updated in blocks, and long documents which you scroll down to read? The page-turning problem was Andrew Marr’s greatest quibble in his article in the Guardian last week, and it strikes me as a ridiculous hangover from paper books. Why this need to turn a page of an electronic document?

That said, I know the difficulty of reading scrollable documents – I frequently find that I lose my place when it is time to scroll down, whereas a page layout seems to help the brain keep its place, knowing that the physical position of the reading point is not going to change in relation to its frame. But surely, there must be a compromise? Does anyone know any alternate methods (such as RSVP)?

All thoughts gratefully received, as ever.

[UPDATE]

And later the same day, as if by magic… here’s an example of the kind of thing I was talking about, made possible by ebooks: Live Ink (VentureBeat article) (Via).

Despite a large amount of research in the area, there is no generally accepted ‘best’ way of reading text. Indeed, many research papers (such as this one) note that no researcher has come to a conclusive result on this. Bigger text is better, but not always aesthetically so, or when there is a large amount of information to fit onto a single page. Colour is another subject of debate: high-contrast text is good, but we seem to have inherited the traditional black-on-white that originally occurred purely to save money on ink. Such concerns are no longer relevant. There was even a period when white text on a black field could be said to be more economical (see this article) but as CRT monitors are phased out in favour of LCD, there is no argument for this either.

One of my favourite little applications is called Writeroom – a small OSX application that allows you to write ‘in seclusion’ by hiding everything on the screen apart from the words you’re typing (there’s also a PC version – Dark Room). The default view (shown above) is green on black, which, alongside the size and font, is completely configurable. I’ve found the default setting the best, and the easiest on the eye.

So, as an experiment, you can now read booktwo.org in such a format – just click that “Enhanced Reading Style” link in the sidebar to switch to an enlarged, green-and-black view of the main body of the page you’re looking at. To switch back, just click the whitetext button in the top right corner of the new page. Try it now. We think it will help with long articles and tired eyes.

It’s all done in CSS – you’re looking at exactly the same content, but with a different layout and colour scheme applied, via an open-source javascript stylesheet switcher. As booktwo.org is already written in fully valid XHTML and CSS, it took about half an hour to set this up. This is the kind of thing that is possible for everyone to do, and I think we’ll see more user-control of pages as the web evolves – many already allow resizing of text, color and layout are the next step.

Is it easy to use? Would you like it in more colour combinations or sizes? What other sites and applications would benefit from this? Let us know what you think.

UPDATE 21/6/07: After quite a lot of feedback, it appears people definitely prefer white on black to green on black, so have changed the enhanced reading style accordingly. I’ve also increased the line-spacing significantly. Better?

UPDATE 17/9/07: Put images back into the enhanced version. Not really sure why I took them out in the first place…

RSVP has been around for a while but is only now on the point of becoming widespread. A simple RSVP example is shown here, courtesy of flashreader.com.

Studies at the University of Wichita, among others, have shown that readers attain the same level of comprehension using RSVP at 250 WPM as they do at their own speed on traditionally-presented text. Admittedly, most readers report that they don’t enjoy the experience, but if their comprehension is at the same level, it’s a matter of getting used to the new format.

Devices and programs for reading ebooks have so far stuck closely to the old model: make it look enough like a pbook and hopefully people will get used to it. But this is technologically and philosophically unnecessary: the core of a literary work is the words it is composed of: the way in which these words are presented is not (usually) part of that information (concrete poetry and certain experimental literary works aside). So RSVP presents an equally valid means of reading – one which can reduce the need for page-sized, blocky ereaders (an RSVP reader would work well on the screen of an iPod, or, as shown by ICUE, on a mobile phone).

Conceptually, RSVP text moves more towards film: a continual stream, in which it is harder to go back, simpler to go with the flow, to forge ahead in the torrent of words. One might not wish to read a textbook or a complex work in such a way, but simple stories can carry us along. Different literary techniques might evolve through RSVP technology: repetition becomes harder for the eye to skip over so emphasis and ennui are easier for author to enforce on the reader [repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition see?].

Try it for yourself – there are a wealth of free downloads out there to experiment with the technology: RocketReader, BookMuncher, RapidReader among them. A comparison table is available here.