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“Iowa City joins Edinburgh, Scotland, and Melbourne, Australia, as UNESCO Cities of Literature. How could a small city in the center of the American heartland have such a wide-ranging impact on creative writing? The answer is that Iowa City, for its size, may be the most literary city on earth.”
In the light of literary achievement the role of the book maker can be unnoticed. And special achievement may mean even further disregard for means of material transmission and metropolis workers in their reverse poetry of making meaning. Or, maybe not.
“Clean space bands twice daily” (The wedging spacers were rubbed in graphite to keep assembled mats casting quickly during constant composition on the Linotype.)
never mind
Here at FotB we are frequently asked if there is a book format perspective that would provide explanation of the global finance collapse. Well there may be. The interaction of self-authenticating print with self-indexing screen could be relevant to a contrast between cash and credit.
The key word is interaction. The transmission ecology requires both print and screen or both cash and credit. Too much credit produces an imbalance where self-authentication or trust is diminished. The self-indexing credit, with computer assisted tracking and tabulation, is easily overextended globally, but the readers cannot really understand where the underlying authentication is.
We can also project finance collapse back on to collapse of cultural transmission. But we would never imbalance cultural transmission by over reliance on screen and digital research at the expense of print. Or would we?
a lifetime of reading
As Kindle passes its first year anniversary its Amazon library has grown from 75K to 200K titles. The suggestion is that Kindle, as a new age provider, can stream a lifetime of reading to the small screen. The pause here is what that means. Can we honestly sustain a full lifetime of reading without a single physical evidence of its passage? From time to time we should glance at a dark Kindle screen and imagine its effervescent as impersonal compared with the graceful, arrayed companionship of physical books.
comments on LC report
The
report separates training from practice and suggests that one follows another. More likely training and practice permeate each other across working careers. It is even possible, via kinetic and intellectual involvement with material culture collections, that training and practice cannot be separated at all, but are aspects of the same activity.
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