What is a book?

["Judith B. Kerman" <kerman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a very interesting discussion so far.  As a novice book artist and
no-longer-novice small press book publisher/designer, but also computer-
addicted poet, co-inventor of a form of computer based hypertext/interactive
poetry and an authoring system for creating hypertexts (WHEW!), also may I
suggest a perspective?

In the workshop I took with Sas Colby at Split Rock 2 years ago, Sas
taught us a couple of things about book as "book" that I like.  First, she
said that a book structures the reader's attention in time in a way that's
like performance, which I take to mean that it's like theatre, dance,
music: the work is progressively revealed in a planned way.  Although
conventional books are partly direct-access devices (very important, as we
compare them with computer-based texts, for instance), they are clearly
designed to be serial devices first.  The sequence and the revelation are
part of the aesthetics of traditional books.  Scrolls have some of this;
so can a cave, if it has multiple walls or rooms; but the process is
different - scrolls, in particular, are not capable of being direct access
devices. Which is probably why the codex was such a successful evolution -
the option of direct access within a primarily serial medium is VERY
powerful because of the way it balances author's authority with reader's
autonomy.

The other thing she pointed to was the intimacy of the book - that you
hold it in your hands, you touch the medium.  Related to this is a major
source of the reader's autonomy - that you control the speed of the
process, that the interaction between you and the page is so private.
(There's a lot of my own interpretation/extrapolation here; the basic
ideas come from Sas but are filtered a lot, especially through computer
ideas!)

Clearly, a lot of book art objects push the envelope (another paper-or-
vellum image!) But perhaps we could think of this as a "fuzzy set"; at the
center is the book with covers and moveable pages that the reader turns,
and for that matter written text that is readable and linear.  Out at the
edges the set melts into other things - theatre, sculpture, hypertext,
paintings that use words, wearable art maybe, movies and television, the
whole discourse about "texts" being developed in cultural studies, the
book as body and the body as book (a special interest of mine).  I made a
bookwork that is a paper sculpture with embedded poems, not terribly
radical these days, although people still asked me why I consider it a
book!

As a general question of argumentation (not just about books), I get
really uncomfortable when people draw hard lines in a continuum and then
insist that those lines are in the right place.  Clearly at the extemes
one thing is a book and the other isn't, but the most interesting stuff
seems to happen right where the lines get drawn.  We maybe can't dispense
with drawing lines, but we should always recognize that the specific
placement of demarcations is inherently arbitrary.  Always.  Wherever we
draw it, even though ultimately we need to draw it in order to do the kind
of thinking human beings do.  When we cut the universe into pieces, we are
always doing a kind of violence, even if only conceptually. If we remember
that, perhaps we will be less likely to get into armwrestles or even go to
war over where the line is drawn?  On the other hand, I always learn a lot
about my own assumptions by studying where other people draw the lines,
even if I end up agreeing to disagree.

(It occurs to me that this is actually a statement of my philosophy of
life, not just about books - hence the global direction of the last couple
of sentences.  $:-)

I look forward to more of this discussion.

Judy Kerman 					(517) 790-4062
College of Arts & Behavioral Sciences		KERMAN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Saginaw Valley State University
University Center, MI 48710	 		*@ @*
				              *@[www]@*
					       \[mmm]/   "Feed me, Seymour!"
					        @\|/@
					       =======
					        \___/