Although borrowed, the format of this post is accurate: I do dog-ear my books. The part of me that’s sympathetic to the tics of an OCD-suffering perfectionist can appreciate how each dog-ear could be considered a tiny folded travesty, but still I’ve come to embrace the practice. Beyond the obvious benefit of marking pages of interest, there’s something nice about a book bearing the physical mark of having fulfilled its purpose of being read; the stamp of an individual reader’s unique interpretation of what parts of a book were important or interesting. It’s always a small wonder to discover bookmarks or margin notes in a second-hand book. I also love finding handwritten messages on paper money. Anyway, no shop-fresh crackless spine or uncreased pages for me.
My usual technique is to fold down the top corner to mark the page I last finished reading, and fold up the bottom corner to mark a page that has a passage of interest. If there’s something good on both sides of a single sheet it gets folded twice, once on the first side, and then doubling up from the already folded corner overleaf. It’s simple but it does the job. A few pages into A Year With Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno, though, I grabbed a B pencil which stayed lodged in place as a bookmark for the rest of the book. This meant that by the time I was done reading it the book was even more battered and misshapen than usual, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
It actually took me quite a while to finish the book, not least because it’s well over an inch thick. I suppose a diary doesn’t necessarily conform to the control over pacing that other forms of writing adhere to (or at least should adhere to, if the writing is half decent), and so there’s often a huge amount of ideas and experiences condensed into just a few pages. After a couple of weeks of Eno-time I was usually full, so it took quite a few sittings to get through the entire year. Actually the appendices of the title, a bunch of more lengthy essays and letters that make up the second part of the book, were much easier to tear through than the daily diary. That’s not to say that the diaries weren’t enjoyable, they were just whiskey to the appendices stout.
Eno is indeed funny and clever, and leads a pretty interesting life (if somewhat unbelievably charmed and immodest). He’s honest though, and the truth about what a famous person actually does on a daily basis is intriguing (e.g. chatting on the phone with Bono and Bowie, enlarging bottoms in Photoshop). Although I suspect that as famous people go, Eno keeps himself unusually busy. Over the course of the year he produces four albums, travels a lot, gives lectures and tutors art students, exhibits his own art, does family stuff, helps to manage a charity, corresponds with Stewart Brand, and generally lives the life of the mind doing whatever else he pleases. The diaries cover all of this activity, interspersed with his ideas about music, art, cooking, computers, women and men. Sometimes the bits that stood out for me were the throwaway single-line thoughts that followed his dinner recipes.
Finally, the potential reader should be aware that this is a book written by a cranky man with little patience, and one who won’t suffer fools (i.e. almost everyone else) gladly. I’m not sure how entertaining popular entertainment would be if Eno had his way, and he’s at least sometimes wrong and quite often disagreeable. Which is to say, I don’t necessarily think that all these quotes are correct or wise, just that they’re interesting.
22 February (p58), on Hollywood:
How determined people seem to be to aim for exactly the same target again and again. A charitable interpretation: by doing so they evolve better tools for everyone else, creating vocabulary out of metaphor. Like those pathetic computer artists who are so thrilled when they’ve finally produced a picture of a daffodil with a drop of dew upon it — indistinguishable from a real photo. To me this would represent total failure, but in fact it’s probably those people who propel the evolution of tools.
28 February (p67), on an approach to photography:
Don’t be predatory. Sit in one place and pay attention or surrender. What looks bad is constant tramping about, a greed for undigested experience. The photograph is digestion deferred: ‘So that’s where I was’.
7 May (p109), on writing music with computers:
New piece of music this morning — lyrical, heterophonic, with rare chord changes. How difficult or discouraged are changes when working with sequencers! The effect of computer sequencing is to split music into vertical blocks with sheer edges. The whole feeling of the dynamic between ‘locked’ and ‘unlocked’ — so important in played music — is thus sacrificed in favour of ‘always locked’. The result is literary linearity rather than musical all-at-onceness.
11 June (p132):
Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
From a 30 June letter to Stewart Brand (p144), on software design:
I myself crash repeatedly into the brick walls of computer culture, and realize more and more that the hype is somewhat premature. As long as the software is nerdified, and major conceptual limitations are built right into the systems at that level, then it cannot get far. This is a philosophical question: when people program — i.e. decide on which set of possible options they should make available — they express a philosophy about what operations are important in the world. If the philosophy they express is on anything like the level of breathtaking stupidity that the games they play and the internet conversations they have are, then we are completely sunk. We are victims of their limitations. It’s as though we’re using a language that has lots of words like ‘cool’ and ’surf’ but not one for ‘organism’ or ‘evolve’ or ’synergy’.
[BTW, if you want to see what type of software Eno is making more than a decade after writing that, check out his music and imagery generating iPhone app.]
From a 2 July letter to Brand, on tools:
You see, I’ve become more and more convinced that the actual physical activity of using equipment has to be commensurate with other physical activities in the same realm. Musical composers that require you to constantly use a typewriter to put your whole mind into a different mode — one which doesn’t necessarily preclude the making of music, but does strongly bias towards a particular type of music. Just as your handling those stones in Avignon, feeling their weight and shape and solidity, would lead you to make a different kind of building with them than if you were dealing with virtual stonelike lumps in your computer, however wonderfully 3D they were… But I think computer users should really start showing their support for things that work with them, and strenuously rejecting things that don’t.
16 August (p178):
Culture is everything we don’t have to do.
27 August (p186):
‘Ah, sweet mystery of life. What a gift — huh? Ain’t you lucky you got in?’ Rubin Levine, violinist in Conversations in Taxis. I love that ‘you got in’ — as though it were a crowded theatre, a hot show that everyone wanted to see.
From a 31 August letter to Stewart Brand (p144), on generative systems:
I’ve noticed that all these complex systems generators (such as ‘Life’ and ‘Boids’ (the flocking one) and ‘The Great Learning’) have something in common — just three rules each. And these three rules seem to share a certain similarity of relationship: one rule generates, another reduces, another maintains. I suppose it’s obvious, really, but perhaps it’s not trivial to wonder if those three conditions are all that you need to specify in order to create a complex system generator (and then to wonder how those are actually being expressed in complex systems we see around us).
16 October (p221):
I also asked Anthea to guess how many mature oaks she thought it would have taken to build a top-of-the-line ship in Nelson’s day. She guessed ten. The astonishing answer (from Brewer’s) is about 3,500 — 900 acres of forest oak. She said, ‘I wonder what we’re doing now that’s as wasteful as that.’ I said it’s called Defence.
16 November (p250), on generative music:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction — imagining a time in the future when kids say to their grandparents, ‘So you mean you actually listened to exactly the same thing over and over again?’ Interesting loop: from unique live performances (30,000BC to 1898) to repeatable recordings (1898– ) and then back to — what? Living media? Live media? Live systems?
From a letter to Tom Sutcliffe (p357):
One suggestion is that the whole basis of human specialness is our ability to cooperate — and to cooperate you have to be able to imagine what it would be like to hold another picture of the world. You’re unable to cooperate unless you can be mentally in at least two worlds at once — your own and that of the person with whom you’re working. The failure to grasp other pictures of the world is what we call autism, and in its extreme from is something we regard as a sever dysfunction. Well, all animals are by our standards relatively autistic — unable to see into each other’s minds, lacking empathy.
So how do we develop this ability to experience and speculate about other ways of thinking and feeling about the world? I think we do it by continually immersing ourselves in cultural experiences that rehearse us. This is obvious in films and novels — where we quite explicitly enter an imagined world and then watch imaginary quandaries. In doing so we develop a lot of surrogate experience about what it is like to be someone else, somewhere else, with different assumptions.
From the essay ‘Miraculous cures and the canonization of Basquait’ (p368):
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences (Roy Ascott’s phrase).
From the essay ‘Unfinished’ (p402):
People are starting to make things that implicitly invite ‘mixing and matching’ instead of presenting us with neatly finished pieces. You can see this breakdown of the singularity of the art-object most spectacularly in the remix movement in popular music… and of course it can’t be very long before we are routinely faced with the awesomely tedious prospect of having to mix everything ourselves at home, the artists just selling a CD-Rom ‘kit of parts’ which you then assemble…
Once we get used to the idea that we are no longer consumers of ‘finished’ works, but that we are people who engage in conversations and interactions with things, we find ourselves leaving a world of ‘know you own station’ passivity and we start to develop a taste for active engagement. We stop regarding things as fixed and unchangeable, as preordained, and we increasingly find ourselves practicing the idea that we have some control.
There were other things that aren’t exactly quotable, but that were good nonetheless. I liked the accounts of trips to Dublin to work with U2 and what he thought of the place. It’s always fun to spot things you recognise from your own life in books and movies. I also really liked all of the stories from the recording studio. It’s clear that Eno takes a reasoned, calculating but very involved approach to his role as record producer; judging value, curating ideas and managing the whole process. A good producer is partly a lot like a critic, but in a much more interesting and challenging way, because they not only have to diagnose deficiencies with the music being made, but also come up with creative solutions. Nice work if you can get it.
Of course, the diary reads a lot like a blog, and a fairly fine one at that. Since it was written in 1995, we’ll forgive the lack of comments and permalinks. It would be great to republish each entry as a daily blog for a year though.
I read an odd little book last week that lends itself particularly well to an immediate, flippant description, so here it is: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a short novel about a man going up an escalator, and what he thinks about while doing so.
It’s also about experience design — or more accurately it’s about how people think about the form and detail of manufactured goods and the feel of everyday things. Everyone has these little thoughts and observations about the world at the level of consciousness that we occupy most of the day, a level that exists just below the threshold of internal monologue. It’s whatever you think without actually saying it aloud in your head [1]. Someone took all of those half-thoughts and wrote a book about them.
Anyway, that’s an overly-dense description of what is in fact an extremely simple conceit: The Mezzanine describes ordinary, mundane stuff without any bias towards usefulness or interestingness, and then expands on what the author thinks of that stuff. The book’s protagonist rides up the escalator, considering various cultural minutiae, most often everyday objects — staplers, neurons, record player needles, the best way to put on socks — and then discusses them all at length. It reminded me at times of observational standup comedy — the Seinfeldian “You ever notice how…?” kind of jokes — without actually trying to be funny or end with a punchline. Instead they’re long non-sequitur non-jokes that just expect you to nod in agreement at the end. Yes, you might say, I have noticed how drinking straws, made bouyant by clinging bubbles of carbon, sometimes float upwards out of a can of Coke and then flop sideways, the end hanging on to the underside of the open mouthpiece, defeating the point of the straw. I never thought about it, but yes, I suppose it is a silly design.
I’d have to quote a long section to convey how microscopically detailed the descriptions of things get [2], or how mundane the topics, but they are always infused with some small sense of wonder. Here’s part of a section that I liked about sugar packets to get you started:
It is impossible to foresee the things that go wrong in these small innovations, and it takes time for them to be understood as evils and acted upon. Similarly, there are often unexpected plusses to some minor new development. What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear it at the top? The nakedness of a simple novelty in pre-portioned packaging has been surrounded and softened and made sense of by gesticulative adaptation (possibly inspired by the extinguishing oscillation of a match after the lighting of a cigarette); convenience has given rise to ballet; and the sound of those flapping sugar packets in the early morning, fluttering over from nearby booths, is not one I would willingly forego, even though I take my coffee unsweetened. (p95)
It would be difficult to say anything about this book without using the word “things” repeatedly, but it’s strangely one of the only words we have to refer to the individual objects that make up “eveything”. Your entire world is made up of objects (most of them probably man-made if you’re in a town or city — imagine that, a completely manufactured environment!) and you have a couple of senses to feel them out with. Things are instances of objects that make up your physical experiences. And so the word “things” just keeps popping up.
Because of the nature of the book (no plot, no character progression), you’re left with plenty of opportunity to zone out yourself and mull over whatever takes your fancy. This probably all sounds very serious or self-important, but it’s not at all.
Some of the elevator cars were filled with passengers; in others, I imagined, a single person stood in a unique moment of true privacy — truer, in fact than the privacy you get in the stall of a corporate bathroom because you can speak loudly and sing and not be overheard. L. told me once that sometimes when she found herself alone in an elevator she would pull her skirt over her head. I know that in solo elevator rides I have pretended to walk like a windup toy into the walls; I have pretended to rip a latex disguise off my face making cries of agony; I have pointed at an imaginary person and said, “Hey pal, I’ll slap that goiter of yours right off, now I said watch it!” (p76)
What makes this funny or interesting is the idea that someone thought it worth writing about this stuff, and then the realisation that pretty deep personal insights can come from following through on them.
Because there’s no such thing as just reading a book any more, here comes the statutory and perhaps ill-advised shout-out to the Internet: a comparison to Twitter (not all of the social network business, but just in relation to interface and motivation). I’d like to have something like a private Twitter account that had no social element, no publishing or online element, but just acts as a low-barrier way of jotting stuff down, of drawing my internal monologue closer to the surface — a record of my continuous near-naught attention, outboard memory storage of things only worth forgetting unless you add them all together. I should probably just write things down more, but it would be, on aggregate, easier for me to keep notes of personal thoughts in something like an IM bot than in a paper notebook [3]. If you know of such an app, let me know. Maybe that’s how some people use online publishing tools like Twitter today, but I’d venture that it’s not how most people use them. It’s nearly impossible to write something online, something that you know will be pushed to other people, without being cognisant in some tiny way of the fact that what you are saying will be perceived. Every act of creation, no matter how effortless or mundane, is tainted by the fact that it has been curated and presented out of a myriad of possibilities. Here’s your pal and mine, John Berger [4]:
An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved - for a few moments, or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. (p10)
It’s just a coincidence that I read this shortly after going into way too much detail about this kind of thing in my bit about corrugated roads, but that might go some way towards explaining why I liked the book so much. There’s a section in The Mezzanine where he wonders about ice skating ice and the gradual deterioration of record grooves that was, I thought, quite similar:
As in the later case of the frayed shoelace, what I wanted here was tribology: detailed knowledge of the interaction between the surfaces inflicting the wear and the surfaces receiving it. For skating: Were there certain kinds of skate strokes that were particularly to blame for the dulling of the skate blade? The sprinting start, the sideways stop? Was very cold ice, or ice with a surface already crosshatched with the engravings of many other blades, liable to dull my blades faster? Was there a way to infer total miles skated by the wear inflicted on the edge of a blade? And for records: Was it the impurities in the vinyl that wore down the needle, or was it the ripples of vinyl music itself, and if it was the music, could we find out what sorts of timbres and frequencies made for a longer-lived needle? (p66)
How much fun is that? However, I would be terrified to actually recommend this book to someone else. I enjoyed it greatly, and continue to enjoy it’s resonance a week later, but I can appreciate how someone else might think it a complete waste of time (although I might secretly pity that person and think them to be lacking imagination and perhaps even some sense of wonder about the world). I just checked, and I can’t believe that it didn’t get any one-star reviews on Amazon; I was expecting to see all fives and ones, but no. It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever, as David St. Hubbins said.
Put it this way: if Nicholson Baker had a blog [5], nobody would read it.
- Stephen Pinker calls this “mentalese” in his book The Language Instinct, and it’s something that keeps coming back to me. Mentalese is the language of thought, a language without words or grammar or symbols, but made entirely of concepts and understanding. Consider it: you’re not constantly talking to yourself in your head; most of the time you just understand or know what your thought process means. Even when language is used externally, those words need to be “translated” into some form of understanding, as anyone who has ever struggled when trying to find the right words can confirm. It’s a fun thought experiment to monitor your own mundane internal thought process and try to verbalise it (I suspect most people have done this at some time).
Aside from all that, you would most likely go nuts without mentalese, and the ability to block out distractions and focus on a single thing, but it’s still interesting to think about mining that level of consciousness in some way. Similarly, it’s probably fun to read the 150-odd pages of The Mezzanine, but reading books like that all the time would drive you to distraction, as we appropriately say in Ireland.
- A lot of this detail is played out in footnotes, often stretching across multiple pages. I suppose this is kind of old hat in postmodern novels by now (D.F. Wallace, Eggers), but The Mezzanine is almost twenty years old. Regardless, because the entire book is composed of tangents to the main story (man goes up escalator) it still works: the footnotes are just tangents to the core tangents.
Also, have you noticed that this digression on footnotes is actually itself a footnote? Baker includes a fantastic footnote about footnotes near the end of the book that would win anyone over.
- It’s worth noting the aptly-named Things.app here, with it’s single-keystroke entry adding. I love the interaction design of Things. A custom keyboard shortcut invokes a HUD input dialog from any app (similar to Quicksilver or Google Desktop), so data entry takes about two seconds from any context, and then these items are filed away to be dealt with when you’re in todo-management mode, in the application itself. Once you’ve learned to file and forget, and trust that that process will work for you, there’s none of the distraction that would otherwise have come from switching between GUIs to perform one small task. Also, the more I learn to use the command line for various simple tasks, the more I like a text prompt as a powerful, fast user interface.
And have you seen the “speechless conversation” video of a guy making a computer speak by thinking about using his vocal cords? Jesus. With a refined interface like that, the barrier to data entry approaches zero — just above the cognitive effort level of mentalese.
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While I’ve got free reign with the footnotes, I might as well mention that gratuitously quoting from famous books to validate your point in blog posts always reminds me of this scene from Annie Hall.
- I checked; he doesn’t, but he has contributed extensively to Wikipedia, which now that I think of it, makes blindingly perfect sense. Baker wrote about Wikipedia in the NY Review of Books this month.
I created a new Flickr group called Guess Where Dublin.
The idea is totally ripped off from many other similar groups, but I think it’s a great concept. Members are encouraged to post a photo taken somewhere in Dublin and everyone else has to guess exactly where it was taken. What could be more fun?
Not entirely unrelated, I just read a beautiful little book that interested types might enjoy: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places by John R. Stilgoe. It’s a “guidebook to exploring” everyday places by walking or cycling, and it really is accessible and enjoyable. From the intro:
The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted — all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in.
Join the group and start exploring.
I’m kind of fascinated by the relationship between literature and place. For a start, those blue cultural plaques that indicate the house that a famous writer once lived in always kind of knock me out, just for their immediacy. I suppose it’s kind of inspiring to think that this, right here, is where so-and-so wandered off in the afternoon to grab some lunch, or clear their heads. George Bernard Shaw lived right around the corner from me once (as did Leopold Bloom). I cycle past Patrick Kavanagh’s bench every day going to work.
Then there’s the recognition of places you already know when reading a book. Dublin has lots of examples of this too (Joyce, of course, O’Casey, Yeats), and I especially sense it in the old pubs here (you can go for pints with Con Houlihan in Madigans or Brendan Behan in McDaids).
All of which is quite the preamble to saying that one of my favourite Google products in ages launched this week: Maps in Book Search. Now every book information page has got a small Google Map showing the locations featured in the book, with links to an extract for each place.
Here’s the map for On the Road showing all of Sal and Dean’s stops:
Book Search is still scanning like crazy, so I’m looking forward to seeing maps of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy and Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory, among others, some time soon.
