EngLit 2570: Materialities of Writing

Besides a recent bother I had knocking around about whether binary code is rhetorical or not, I’ve also been thinking about divination, natural religion, and how to read the world.
Or, thought another way: how the world communicates (in a totally nonmetaphysical way)
to us and how we read those signs.

Here’s some of the first chapter of Wallace’s The Pale King:

Some cows come overhead then, three of four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture’s wire beyond which one horse smells at the other’s behind, the lead horse’s tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks’ burr. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilting posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

What really strikes me most about this snippet is the number of things being read or up for interpretation. The crows are reading, in a way. The shoe is writing. The worms’ bodies are writing. The horse is inspecting. Etc. Much is going on in the world.

It may seem cliche, but I remember watching old movies and being incredibly jealous of Native American trackers who could pick up a leaf and know which direction someone fled. The ability to know something so large–e.g. the world–and to read it so astutely strikes me as more magical than magic.

Of course, none of these writings are alphabetical. They are symbolic. But is that not a form of writing, too? Do we read logos?

Computer code, to me, seems like just the most sophisticated iteration of the cavewall handprint, and the projection of a website the full image of a horse and bull in motion. The handprint is smaller. On silicon. And the image is shifting. We are still trying to tell other people where the best places to go are, where to avoid, and what we think and believe. But now the cave is in the home, atomized, not unitary.

As a spark off this main fire, I remember the large projection big screen TVs of the late 80s and early 90s, and how if an image was left on the screen too long, it would burn into the screen, effectively ruining it. The same with computer screens. Ironic, I think, that so long ago, permanency was sought after, while we are actively writing more code (think: screen savers) to wipe the permanent away.

Our hands are getting smaller, and the cavewall is getting ever wider.

Undertaking this signment, I wanted to think about what surface or material would define my act of writing, both in terms of what I wrote and how. I ended up enacting and then writing this recipe.

Recipe for One (1) Written Egg:

1. Using the sharp point of a knife, bore two small holes into either end of a large egg.

2. Drain the egg of its yolk by gently blowing on one hole to force the yolk out the opposite end. (WARNING: Take care not to get raw egg into your mouth, which can carry salmonella.)

3. Rinse out and carefully dry the empty eggshell.

4. Write lightly on the eggshell with the utensil of your choosing. A soft-tipped pen, marker, or brush will be most effective.

5. Store the written egg in a safe place to prevent its breaking.

Directions I haven’t included here reach back farther into this materiality’s life. Perhaps I should really begin with purchasing a carton of large eggs at the local Giant Eagle. The complex, entwined system of farming and commerce that got the eggs to my Giant Eagle in the first place is just as relevent, but beyond the scope of this signment.

Then, in a dramatic ethical complication, I decided to streamline this signment into lunch.

Jokes aside, this process made me think about what is used and what is thrown away. I was about to blow the insides of the egg straight into the sink before I realized I could reuse them (for lunch). Whereas normally, when preparing a meal of fried eggs, I discard the shells without a second thought, except to make sure to wash my hands afterwards.

More broadly, this is about the transformation from an object, or in this case an animal by-product, into a writing surface. This little project only gestures at stakes that could be much higher, as in our reading of “Pigs and Parchment” last week. Who decides, and how, that an animal becomes a writing surface? What happens, physically and metaphorically, in the process of making something into a writing surface? As in “Pigs and Parchment,” I can’t help but predict that a discourse of power might emerge from looking closely at this process. Writing almost seems to become, under certain circumstances, an act of ownership, intrusion, domination, or violence.

In our brief discussion of tattoos last week, I expected a conversation about writing on bodies to ensue, but we navigated away from that. I think a continued conversation along those lines, though fraught, may elucidate some issues underlying inscription, surfaces, and the act of writing.

I made you guys a map:

But to read it, you’ll have to look at this link: http://postimg.org/image/y4qdqt4ol/full/

because, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I made the writing so small you could see it, but not understand it unless you zoom all the way in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about maps this week– I can’t read them!  I can read almost everything else, but why not maps?  And then, this week, Steve Carr told me I should make a MAP of my project papers which made sense but was also so funny.  Really, I wanted to draw a picture of the car that was going to drive me where I needed to go, but a map?  A map seems beautiful, but useless.

And then I needed to study a subway map of a city I’d never been to in order to figure out what neighborhood I should stay in that was closest to the subway line that took me where I needed to go.  And my head nearly exploded.  I tried to compare the subway map to the neighborhood map to the street map.  Eventually, I had to get someone else to read it for me.

So, I decided I should make a map.  Full disclosure: I did not make that watercolor.  The story of where I got that map is on the map itself.  I couldn’t figure out how to make a map except to make it nearly illegible, and not in any particular order.  If I really wanted to make it accurate, I’d have it switch to its mirror image every so often to throw you off even further, but that is beyond my scope of knowledge.

My original plan was to construct an encaustic collage commenting on wax tablets, ear candling, beeswax, etc. As I began to to prepare my wax-and-damar medium, I realized my canvases had gone missing — I had no solid surface.

As I paced around my apartment seeking a new plan (with a tabula rasa sans the tabula, so to speak), every object became a potential surface on which to construct. I scribbled a note about shedding and collecting culture on my lint roller. I re-discovered a college relic: a napkin detailing ideas for a conceptual art piece a friend and I wanted to install in our dining hall. I looked down and thought about my feet. I often think about feet, having composed recent papers featuring footless birds of paradise and poultry with prosthetic feet.

I started brainstorming on my feet.

Evidently I wanted to consider autology and prosody (“molossus” is cut off at the bottom there), toe jam (where I jammed my toe), anatomy (entertaining the fact that humans have cuneiform bones in each foot), and Achilles (of course). On the other side of my foot, I’d drawn waves, considered splinters, discussed bound feet and grounds covered.

I love writing on skin (and tangentially, have always been intrigued by the terrific tradition of anthropodermic bibliopegy, books bound in human skin). Between discussing compositions on ballet slippers to those on vellum in class, my living-foot-skin project seemed feasible.

While my right foot was used for notes (pictured), I saved my left for the final product. Things got messy once I realized I was not flexible enough to write legibly on the entirety of both my feet. I gave up and found a rubber band someone flung at me yesterday, and scribbled a lesson to myself:

Feeling the rubber band too uncharacteristically minimalistic and focused, I was determined to excavate more odds and ends. I found a dented tin and broken bits and made a little box of sad excuses, and finally felt I had completed the project to a satisfactory end:

In her introduction to the facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, The Gorgeous Nothings, Jen Bervin suggests that Dickinson’s collection of poems written on reused envelopes “convey[s] a sense of New England thrift and her relationship to the larger household economy of paper.”  Bervin tells us that The Frugal Housewife, a book that Dickinson’s mother received from her father on the occasion of her birth, opens with this advice: “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing is lost.  I mean fragments of time as well as materials” (9).  I had Bervin’s introduction—the idea of household economy, of saving and reuse—loosely in mind when I made the quick decision while cleaning out the fridge to save the mesh backings of from two bags of oranges and use them in this week’s signment.  And I thought: one thing a piece of writing that “highlights its materials” might look like is a piece of writing that comes into being on and through unconventional writing materials.

It goes without saying that my objects are nowhere near as elegant and provocative (not to mention interesting) as Emily Dickinson’s—but I’m something of a self-deprecator, so I’m saying it.  I wondered what it would take to get a grocery list onto these mesh rectangles—what kind of labor and methods and with what differing results.  The first of these was done with yarn and needle drawn through the mesh’s holes to negotiate a kind of stitched cursive.  The second was done with black acrylic.  In case you were wondering, I hardly every buy peas or beef, but I like four-letter words.  They’re so very English.  I wanted also sage and salt, but I did the yarn version of this list first, and I quickly grew tired of making words.  I can at least say for certain that these pieces of writing highlighted their materials to me, for quickly in my process of working with mesh, yarn, and paint did I have to think about how to use these materials in order to render legible writings, something I almost never have to do with pen and paper.  (Apparently I decided that writing and legibility had to go together on this one.)

I’m trying to be better about saving things.  Thinking of potential discards in terms of surfaces, inks, tools for marking, making, writing—this demands a re-visioning of my household economy.  I’ve been exploring the world of artists’ books and book arts lately, and I’m often jealous of these beautiful projects that make use of high quality, professional materials and masterful skills.  Yet I have a deep appreciation for what we can do with the things we have on hand—that is, what materials we’ve culled from the discards of our daily lives and what we know how to do with our hands at a given moment.  Learn as you go: learn from the materials: imperatives that inform the projects I ask my students to do, as well as my own.

I want to end with a swerve toward some questions: what might be a piece of writing that doesn’t highlight its materials?  Would an e-book be one such thing?  If we think of highlighting as “making visually prominent” (as my dictionary thinks of it), as willfully emphasizing, does a paper book maybe not highlight its materials, either?  (Might this actually be how its design works?)

“Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point for another.”

-Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book

“Hermeneutic Code…all those units whose function it is to articulate in various ways a question, its response, and the variety of chance events which can either formulate the question or delay its answer; or even, constitute an enigma and lead to its solution.”

-Roland Barthes, S/Z

“All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.”

-Roland Barthes

I’ve decided to be rather enigmatic with my blog post this week. As I read Johns, I began to doubt my ability to compose something that would highlight its own materials. What does this mean? Certainly, within the modernist art movement, there seemed to be a sense that this question could be definitely answered. For instance, the flatness of a canvas became the content of a work on canvas itself, rather than something that was disguised through perspective. (According to Bazin, this “freeing” of art to pursue what was actually appropriate to its material became possible because of the cinema, which actually allows for a realism with perspective.) Whether any of my examples so far count as examples of writing remains up in the air.

I chose my first two epigraphs because they capture my urge to answer the question posed for this signment definitively, but also my belief that such a question can never be answered definitively. I am not sure how to best highlight the materials of a book, for example. What is most appropriate to a print codex? Johns seems to want to resist some adjectives generally assigned to this material technology, and some claims about historical events that allegedly unfolded because of what the book made appropriate and possible.

Thinking about many recent claims about digital materials, and debates about what artforms might be appropriate to them, I was (of course) led to the word “code.” Nowadays, code means computer code. But code also used to mean handwritten code, and then print code. Code is a form of inscription that can conceptually exist and work through many technologies. As a child, I read many “Nancy Drew Mystery Stories.” I also have watched many old thrillers. Within these story-worlds, code is often the most prominent kind of writing. It moves the fictional worlds in many ways. Have you experienced such stories? Have you ever witnessed a print book being used as a key to discovering some other message, some other content, which is also the content of the book, written through the book?

Perhaps, during wars and political intrigues, a print book was not often actually used as the generative “key” to an encrypted message—probably too cute. However, my point might be that direction through encrypted inscription is not only appropriate to digital materials. One could argue that it is most appropriate to digital materials. But what materials and technologies enabled this kind of writing originally? What made cryptography seem “appropriate” to the human mind? Are there ways or methods of reading and writing, and thinking about reading and writing, that seem to connect to this act of inscription? And how does this question relate to the “History of the Book,” which is also often the history of the printing press, and the history of something called “modern society”?

PLAIN TEXT: HERMENEUTICCODE

I’ve been a redditor (don’t do it!) for awhile now. For a long time, I enjoyed the site for its endless cat pictures, silly memes, and sometimes-funny comment threads. About a year ago, I did a massive overhaul of my frontpage to include subreddits that directly applied to my meatworld interests. Gone were r/pics, r/funny, and r/adviceanimals. (I admit I still frequent r/videos even though it’s not on my frontpage). I replaced it with subreddits like r/teaching, r/rhetcomp (and r/comprhet), r/steelers, r/daddit, and so on.

Recently, my brother-in-law suggested r/bookexchange. The concept is simple. You post a list of titles that you’re willing to exchange, as well as a list of titles that you’re seeking out.  If anyone sees a title they like, they can offer you something you’re looking for, or show you their list of titles-to-exchange, you swap meatworld addresses and you send the books on their way. This was something I could do, something I’d enjoy doing. I am a bibliophile (aren’t we all). So, I joined the subreddit, but remained inactive until very recently.

See, we moved into our house right around the time our son was born, so my books have remained in piles in my office for the past nine months. Several of you have helped me gather various furnitures with which I might shelve these books, but it wasn’t until recently that I came across a massive teak desk/shelving unit that I was finally able to give all my books a home. And with that, I was finally able to exchange some books!

It started with my titles. Rather than limit them, I decided to list everything and engage in negotiations in the moment. If it was a title I couldn’t part with, I’d be honest about that. If it wasn’t, awesome. And rather than list them, I took panoramas of each shelf. This was a satisfying procedure, and I ended up with an imgur album that I get a lot of pleasure looking at.

I got some bites, and they were for books I was comfortable parting with and for titles I was excited to receive (even though some of them weren’t titles I was looking for): Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test & Doors of Perception for The Power and the Glory and Baron Von Steuben’s Revolutionary War Drill Manual; Flowers for Algernon for Pearls of Lutra; A History of God for Watchmen; Brave New World for Game of Thrones.

Some of these books had been with me for awhile, so I decided to write a little note inside them to the person with whom I was exchanging the book. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette (or redditquette) of this. r/bookexchange suggests putting your username in the book, as well as the date when you exchanged it, and then “paying it forward” by offering the book up to be exchanged again. But that seemed insubstantial, plus I had this signment to take care of….

So, I wrote some notes in some of the books I sent out:

Some observations about this writing: I did not know this people to whom I was exchanging books; I didn’t even know their names. Hence “MsAdler” and “szhamilton,” our usernames. There was some trepidation in sharing my meataddress with digital folks, but then….why? Part of my email footer is “search szhamilton,” as “szhamilton” is my handle for a great number of services, from reddit to stumbleupon to twitter to gmail. I guess what I’m thinking is: if someone wanted to kill me, they could’ve figured out how to a long time ago. But, if I’m not in class in a week, then I have been murdered by MsAdler, who has been a redditor for about one year and was a member of Team Periwinkle.

The writing (a short note) I put into these books needed to highlight the books (the material), because that was the only thing that I had in common with the recipient of this writing. Interestingly, though, my writing didn’t highlight the materiality of the book itself, but rather the contents of the book. These contents would seem to be transferrable, existing as they could in my trade copy edition of A History of God, or in a subsequent paperback edition.

But! my writing also mentions (and apologizes for) the underlining and marginalia in this copy of the book, which is a material aspect of this particular book. And now, so too is the short note, written as it is on one of the early pages of this and the other books I’m exchanging through r/exchange.

I don’t rightly know what (if anything) to make of any or all of this, other than to say I have some questions following my participation in this signment:

1. Is the content of a book a material aspect of a book? (If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear it…if a book goes unread….)

2. Is the digital world (cyberspace) a mere facilitator for material exchange, exemplified by my participation in r/bookexchange? What is the materiality of a site like reddit above and beyond the actual material things that can be exchanged through its various subreddits?

3. Exchange, as conducted through a site such as r/bookexchange or as conducted in any bookstore, relies on materiality. I give you a thing of an agreed upon value, you give me different thing of similarly agreed upon value. Here’s $5, I would like that sandwich. If this was r/ebookexchange, would the exchange be the same as the exchange that takes place through r/bookexchange? Are the rules and mechanisms of material exchange transferrable to the rules and mechanisms of virtual exchange?

I was really stuck on what to do this week without replicating prior poetic projects I’ve done in different contexts (book manipulation, book making, etc.), but then it came to me… literally. In the mail.

My materials are self-evident: West Elm catalog, and a black sharpie. The process of redaction/erasure (generally referred to as the latter in poetic circles), helps a new thing emerge. The method is simple: erase or remove (or black out, in this case) some words and leave others. The new words form a new “poem.” While I’m not certain what I’ve composed is poem, it certainly has its moments. There’s a lexicon here that became for me oddly meta with regard to this class. Words I could not help but leave open to the air: design, section, collect, now, print, lines, hand-crafted, hand, made, thing, intentions, desk… and a several beautiful color names.

It also became evident to me the labor involved with constructing these catalogs… the diagrammatic choices as much as developing the lexicon. The pages have to feel consistent. It’s as though the makers agreed upon a set of words from which to choose to describe these mid-century-inspired furniture pieces and textiles, the way I’ve chosen those words to redact. This is certainly a work that is as much designed as it is written.

Here are a few of my favorite moments: 

For this signment I kept thinking what the hardest thing to corral would’ve been.

• Blood?
• Large masses of bodies?
• Insects?

The first is too messy. The second too surly. The third too unruly and creepycrawly.

I remembered that the point is too emphasize and showcase the material itself. But then, in the basic sense, when you write with paper and pen, which material is more exposed?  The paper? The ink? The relation between both? Hard to say, really. If I was a skywriter, would I consider more beautiful and interesting the sky or the smoke…? [Those interested in this concept please read Roberto Bolano’s Distant Star.]

So I became enmeshed in trying to think through what combination of materials would be shifting enough for me. Oscillation. Vacillation. Material waffling.

I’ll let you figure out what I decided on…

And just so we’re on the same page, I’m a fan of The Police and that song, but not the literal message.

In response to our recent discussion about the materiality of things like:

1. Our emails.
2. Our email drafts.
3. Our deleted emails.
4. The words we type into Google search bars or Facebook status updates.

Here are two news stories worth checking out, one very recent, one not as recent:

1. How Target Figured Out a Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did
2. Google Outed Me

Yours in terror,

Sam