An old chestnut, foreboding on a cold December day:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
--Albert Einstein
bibliophage: biblio-. Prefix. Book: bibliophile.[From Greek biblion, book.];
-phage. Suffix. One that eats: macrophage. [From Greek -phagos, eating, from phagein, to eat.]
"Of the Bibliophagi or Book-Eaters" is the self-glossing title of chapter 9 of Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), a veritable baedeker to the symptoms and varieties of what is surely the best documented form of literary madness (bibliomania has spawned a vast and eccentric body of literature over the centuries). Appropriately, I picked up my copy a few years back from Blue Whale Books, a second-hand bookstore located in the downtown mall of Charlottesville, Virginia. C'ville is arguably the Bibliomaniac capital of the academic world, home to the Rare Book School, the U of Virginia, Studies in Bibliography, the Bibliographic Society of the U of Virginia, and some of the finest bibliographic minds of the last half century, not to mention the birthplace of the Hinman collator.
I'm particularly enchanted by the bibliophagi, whose regular ingestion of pulp and ink serves as a valuable reminder that there really are viable alternatives to the Atkins diet. Books are edible, Holbrook tells us, and "to serve their purpose must be eaten: you must eat the book, you must crush it, and cut it with your teeth and swallow it."
As every parent knows, books are one of the first solid foods a child acquires a taste for. On the authority of one Rosenbach, Holbrook speculates that the principle reason first editions of Alice in Wonderland are so scarce is that they've quite literally been eaten into extinction. The essayist Anne Fadiman provides corroborating evidence:
When my son was eight months old, he devoured literature. Presented with a book, he chewed it. A bit of Henry's DNA has been permanently incorporated into the warped pages of Goodnight Moon, and the missing corners of pages 3 and 8 suggest that a bit of Goodnight Moon has been permanently incorporated into Henry. ("A Glutton for Books," Civilization December 1996.)
Bibliophagia naturally lends itself to (ahem) sound-bites. According to Fadiman, Charles Lamb was partial to books containing traces of buttered muffins. More ecumenical in taste, Elizabeth Barrett Browning preferred to sample the full range of biblio fare, nibbling here and there "like some small nimble mouse between the ribs / Of a mastodon."
Bibliophagia appeals to the analytic bibliographer in me. When Matt and I stumbled across Eat This Book in a Washington DC toystore a year ago, I greedily snatched it up. Its edible pages ("wafer paper") can be made legible with the edible-ink pen (the "FooDoodler"). According to the FDA-mandated nutritional label on the inside cover, the wafer paper, which is made out of potato starch and turnip oil, contains only four calories per serving, while the FooDoodler comes in at an astounding zero calories. (Rice cake lovers, eat your heart out.)
Edible words are a frequent theme in the book arts. John Latham's notorious Still and Chew involved a complex production cycle of chewing, regurgitating, and recontextualizing: students were first invited to gnaw away at a library copy of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture. The resultant masticated pulp (I'm reminded of an Asian delicacy that goes by the euphemistic name of "Swallow's Nest") was further broken down in an acid bath, then bottled, labeled ("Essence of Greenberg"), and finally returned to circulation in its altered state, much to the dismay of St. Martin's librarians, who, I gather, were at a loss as to how to catalog their prandial acquisition. (The story goes that Latham lost his job over the incident).
One of my favorite finds is Books2Eat, the international edible books festival. The website includes a photogallery guaranteed to make any red-blooded bibliophage salivate. (More grist for my Writing for Artists mill . . . )
So what about electronic books? Are they destined to be the offal of the book world? My prediction is that we'll see MIT launch an Edible Media program in the next decade. Hey, they already have tangible computing and wearable computing--can edible computing really be far behind?
Next semester, assuming Virginia's state universities are still financially solvent, I'll be teaching Writing for Artists in the Interarts Department at George Mason University. The course has been so successful that Claire MacDonald, who designed it, is now in the process of staffing multiple sections. That's where I come in. AVT 395 was offered to me as a temp job, one attractive enough to lure me out of adjunct semi-retirement (I've been working on the diss. full time for the past year). It's a fabulous course, but don't take my word for it: check out Claire's syllabus for yourself.
As an initial assignment, Claire has her students do a Burroughs cut-up. I plan on following her lead, perhaps pairing the cut-up with an Oulipian exercise to contrast the two modes of literary creation: aleatory (Burroughs in the tradition of Dadaism and Surrealism) and algorithmic (the Oulipians, self-consciously renouncing surrealist games of chance). But I've also been toying with updating the cut-up for a new generation of technology-savvy students. How might I port the exercise into the twenty-first century? What are its possible extensions or variations?
Oddly enough, I'm tempted to take a page from Scott Rettberg's interview with Jason Nelson last month. Because it was transcribed with Dragon Naturally Speaking's notoriously buggy voice recognition software, the interview reads a lot like a cut-up. When I first saw it, I was reminded of a random text that the software once generated when I left my microphone on overnight with the Dragon window open. I still don't know how to account for it: was Dragon transcribing ambient noise, purging its memory banks, or channeling the ghost in the machine? Whatever the explanation, computational or occult, I've been unable to duplicate the results.
What is abundantly clear, though, after further experimentation, is that Dragon--at least the older versions of it--interprets everything within its auditory range as human speech: the crumpling of paper, the repeated thump of a shoe or hammer, the opening or closing of a book, the drumming of fingers on a table. In Dragon's Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It's personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything capable of generating friction has potential artistic application. I think of the sounds of a painting or etching or collage coming into being: fresh paint slapped with the flick of the brush onto taut canvas, acid eating away at a metal plate, paper torn and cut and pasted. Filtered through Dragon, these sonic waves become the choral voices of the atelier.
I can imagine a two-part exercise. Part I would require students to describe the acoustics of their work space in essay form. What does the dark room sound like? The sculptor's studio? the printer's workshop? The computer lab? Is it possible to impart an idea of one's artistry by channeling the experience through a single sensory modality? Part II would consist of Dragon's phoeneticized transcription of those sounds, that space: the glossolalia of artistic expression. The assignment would be a hybrid of sorts, part surrealist or Dadaist in its incorporation of chance procedures, part ekphrastic in its synaesthetic co-mingling of visual and verbal stimuli.
Would the experiment be more interesting if there were some predictability to the results, i.e., if, for instance, analog brush strokes were consistently rendered by Dragon as fricatives, digital processes (hammering or pounding or stippling) as stops? My own thinking is no, that the quest for purposeful agency misses the point, which is to situate the transcriptions within the history of aleatory art. The idea is to embrace rather than eschew chance and indeterminacy. My touchstones are Cozens, automatic writing, and Surrealism, not Pope, Rationalism, and Raymond Queneau. (For a superb thumbnail history of chance art, see the entry by that name in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.)
That said, a trial run did reveal some hidden purpose. Coloring a plastic plate with swift, consistent marker strokes, I obtained the following text, notable for its repetitiveness:
With the bus to distance business assistance assistance with the only if the Pentagon and I think about that the think about that did it did that it with the submitted to think that the independent and that defendant at that it with the independent independent attempt to that defendant at the event of the equipment
*********************
I may or may not end up incorporating these nascent ideas in the classroom (how do I make Dragon available to fifteen or so students without violating IP law or asking them to shell out dollars they don't have?). But as a concept, the project has led me to some interesting finds. In the process of browsing for keyphrases like "voices of objects" or some such, I stumbled across an emergent field of research of which I was wholly unaware: archeoacoustics, also known as paleoacoustics. It's a bracing reminder of why I'm a textual critic, committed to the study of the transmission of information through time and space. The idea behind paleoacoustics--that sound waves are sometimes inadvertently recorded in artifacts--is in itself disarmingly simple; it's the playback that still proves elusive. Imagine a potter of antiquity at his wheel, singing, uttering oaths perhaps, or reciting Homeric verse. Those notes, those expletives or meters, it turns out, are durable media that may have survived in the grooves of the clay pot, like sound on vinyl. The question then becomes one of retreival.
The task of paleoacoustics is to restore the tongue of Keats' unravished bride of quietness; to make that cold, silent urn speak again.
Read about paleoacoustics here, here, and here. (And on a tangentially related note, don't miss Digital Needle: A Virtual Gramaphone).