Safran Foer takes a scissor to his favorite book

I am very excited to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Tree of Codes. To create it, Safran Foer cut out sections of his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. By subtracting text he was able to create a new story. The thing is part arts/crafts project, part narrative puzzle, part hommage to changing technology. Otherwise said, it has my name written all over it. Book publicist, where the hell is my free copy! 

Codes is a work that really is specific to the medium. A common line in articles about this book is, roughly said: Isn’t this interesting that here is finally a book that really could not be done on an iPad or Kindle.

However, I could imagine a nice version of this done for the iPad. It’d need to be done as if each page were a photograph; it’d need to give the look of flipping pages.

I can deny that the physical page means more here than it does in many books. I mean, plenty of kinds of books work well on tape (not really tape, but audio whatever whatever). This one wouldn’t.  

In a Vanity Fair interview with Heather Wagner, he says:

“Some things you love passively, some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it. Then I started thinking about what books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the physicality of books. I love breaking the spine, smelling the pages, taking it into the bath… I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.”

13

Newspapers, Magazines and Books! Oh My!

I enjoyed this piece in Fortune about the future of books and newspapers and magazines.  The writer, Josh Quittner, starts out with a nice little anecdote about how his 12-year-old recently subscribed to Vogue.  

Each month Clem was excited when Vogue arrived. She’d rip into the issue and scamper up the stairs to her chambre à coucher, with enough enthusiasm to do Anna Wintour proud. But after digesting each issue, Clem would reappear with it hours later — only now a zillion Post-its jutted from its pages, stegosaurus-like.

Over time, one by one, those stegosauri began to stack up, spines out, in her closet. One day I decided to take a peek at the dinosaur graveyard to see what my daughter was tagging so furiously. It turned out that she was trying to annotate each issue, sorting the material by outfits, accessories, footwear, and other categories for later reference. I noticed that the more issues she tagged, the more frustrated she became. This was a lot of work. So why was she doing it?

“Don’t you get it?” my wife observed. “She’s trying to turn the magazine into a computer.”

Et voilà! Of course she was.

Read More

8

#MargaretAtwood

All the arguing about media formats these days can drive you crazy. Or at least it drives me crazy. The reason? The suggestion that one form of communication is “better” than another—that one will “kill” the other.

I think every technology has its time and place. You can fight it, but what’s the point. Sometimes, I feel bad for formats that don’t have defenders. Like scrolls. Or cave painting. No one ever gets nostalgic for that stuff.

As the iPad sneaks up on us, this whole book/paper vs. screen debate is reaching a kind of fever pitch. Here is where I stand: If you want to read on paper, read on paper. If you want to read on a screen, do it. For the moment, we still have these options—if future generations want to eliminate paper, that’s their problem. They’ll certainly make some friends who are trees. In the end, it’s all still a form of reading and exchanging ideas, right? Does it matter how we do it? 

This quote I just read in this piece by Margaret Atwood, a Twitter fan, echoes my feelings. 

So what’s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.

Thanks for backing me up, Mags! 

7

Book lover Rosa Golijan earned girl crush points today when she posted an obsolete computer that was made into a water pipe. Get ready for a braingasm, folks.

But, more importantly, she asks a question I get asked nearly daily: are paper books going the way of Fahrenheit 451?

This usually leads me to ask the only natural follow up question: What will happen to all the world’s book shelves?

Which spits me on the doorstep of the question that really matters: anyone know how to make a bong out of a bookcase?

Happy Birthday, Word!

A few months ago, I did a debate at Word in Greenpoint, not far from where yo vivo con mi esposo bonito, qui es d’Espana, y mi pero pequeño, qui es Poodle-Yorkie. (Am learning Spanish! Very slowly!).

I love Word. I bet you have to pass some sort of “cool” test to work there. “No, we don’t. Because tests are inherently uncool.” That’s the kind of thing I think that someone who worked there would say. Word, word.

Some of their employees debated me about whether or not certain things would become obsolete, and they each kicked my bum. They showed up with notes and stuff. I thought that I could just get by using my book as my notes, but then I realized that they’d been able to read “my notes.” And they didn’t even have to buy the book! They could’ve just read it at the store! Damn. So, their arguments were more like rebuttals to things that I wrote and researched more than a year beforehand. In most cases, I decided my best option would be to use my turn to tacitly agree with their sides and then have my dad answer questions from the audience. I just always ask myself: What Would Amos Do? He’d yap, yap, drop and roll.

Anyway, the point is: the debate was great, Word is great, and Amos is very wise. But the original point of all this was that I was going to say that I just read that Word’s new online store will take twenty percent off your purchase if you write “Happy Anniversary, WORD!” in the comments section at checkout. The site is WordBrooklyn.com. I believe in eating local, and books are mostly made of plants. Smaller stores are so often overshadowed by Amazon, which has liberal views about shopping in my undies. But Word has so much more personality and is a much more pleasant addition to the neighborhood than another DuaneReade. Also, I believe in supporting any bookstore that has its own basketball team.

Question from the audience: Will books become obsolete?

Answer from me: There’s no way to know, but I really do think that books will become obsolete sooner or later. Probably sooner than later. A generation or so from now, I think they will seem like relics of an faraway time. The Kindle, the iPhone, and other kinds of feats of technology and design and engineering that are trying to do a job that paper seemed to do so effortlessly, are still leaning heavily on the design of books, and I think things will probably continue in that direction for quite a while. But, in many cases, it’s like a game of telephone: Most modern computers were designed so that we input information using a system almost identical to the typewriter. Because it’s something that people were used to. Early typewriter designs leaned heavily on the look and operation of the piano. Because it’s something people were used to. Pianos took major hints from harpsichords, which incorporated design elements of the hurdygurdy, which which which blah. Digital pictures are still rectangular because film was rectangular. Would CDs have been made round if records hadn’t been round? One thing builds onto the next until the innermost Russian nesting doll packs up and marries a snow globe.

I’m going to wager that my great-great-grandkids will read from left-to-right (if they speak English) on rectangular screens or tickers or whatever. The text will still mostly be dark and the backgrounds will probably white, just like printed ink on paper was. But I doubt they’ll be reading actual books like we read today.

As someone who loves books, I feel sad about this. At the Word debate, a lot of people were emotional about this subject. Thing is, I love books because I grew up with them. I was, in someway, conditioned to love them. If they yelled and jumped on the table and started swinging brooms every time I brought one home, I would’ve felt differently. My parents loved them—they’d been raised the same way. But we already know that there are plenty of kids in today’s world who can’t read, or don’t get read to, or rarely come into contacts with books at all.  There are probably more people in this category than ever before (at least, since the invention of books). Are these kids as likely to grow up to be book lovers? And what if the first kind of “book” they ever come into contact with is actually some kind of eBook? The nostalgic element of emotional attachment shifts to a new technology, just like I know plenty of people who geek out about computers from the 1980s but couldn’t care less about typewriters. Or hurdygurdies! Funny thing is that it doesn’t seem much of a loss to us in the now. And the vast majority of the people who sang the gospel of the typewriter (and scorned its descendants) are now dead.

I don’t remember what I was talking about any more.

Anyway, go to WordBrooklyn.com. Or to the actual store. Tell ‘em I sent ya! I love books. If I had one wish, I’d ask that that they live on forever as actual objects and not just as a vestigial design element. Either that, or peace on Earth.

2

Sometimes when I hear of a book I want, I buy it and then I put it away with every reassurance that it will be read soon, forget about it, hear about it again, buy it again, and only realize my mistake when I place it next to its twin on the bookshelf. It’s an addiction of good intentions.

Joshua Ferris author of Then We Came to the End — Room For Debate, NYT. Do you think that people of the future will have this problem?