Marginaalia

somewhat

Wed, 22 May 2013 02:02:25 +0300

somewhat

A different kind of punch.

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:18:35 +0300

A different kind of punch.

Üldiselt on ka need lugeja märkused, mis justkui autoriga...

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:11:00 +0300

Üldiselt on ka need lugeja märkused, mis justkui autoriga vestlevad, siiski tema autokommunikatsioon või kommunikatsioon teiste lugejatega. Aga siin on autori (Ishiguro) marginaalia tema enda raamatus. Kas oma isikliku eksemplari annoteerimine on autokommunikatsiooniakt? Samas pole nende sisu autokommunikatsioonile omane (Kas või “Salisbury has always held a special magic for me” ja “Yes, this is completely made up” kõlab rohkem nagu miski, mida jutustatakse kellelegi teisele. Või omaenda amneesilisele tuleviku-minale, kes võib hakata Hayes Society jälgi ajama?) Või on see Ishiguro tahtlik mäng “isiklike märkuste” - “avalike selgituste” teljel, sarnane varjatud ekshibitsionism (mäherdune oksüümoron), mis igasugu kuulsate “Marginaaliate” puhul (“oh, ma siin niisama sodisin oma isikliku raamatu leheserva vaimukaid märkusi… aga äkki avaldaks?”), ainult et kõige privilegeeritumast, autori enda vaatepunktist.

Even if marginalia pretends to address the author, it actually constitutes either the reader’s autocommunication or his/her communication with other readers. Here, however, you have the author’s (Ishiguro’s) annotations to his own copy of his own work. Are they intended as self-communication or are they really communication presented as autocommunication, “intimate notes to oneself” - a covert exhibitionist’s response to voyerist demands? It depends on whether the author’s intentions included taking photos and hanging them up for everyone to see (sounds logical, but you never know where the omniviscent eye of the internet media can reach… they could be reading YOUR marginalia next!), but some of the content ( “Salisbury has always held a special magic for me”, “Yes, this is completely made up”) suggests they were created for display, for others to read, not for the privacy of his own bookshelf. Although these annotations might prove useful in case of memory loss. Who knows.

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:04:04 +0300

"When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:34:05 +0300

““When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.””

- Amos Oz (via hmhbooks)

Photo

Sun, 05 May 2013 23:27:15 +0300

Grant Snider @ Incidental Comics

Sat, 04 May 2013 01:38:37 +0300

Grant Snider

Incidental Comics

can I live there please? Shakespeare & Company, Paris,...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:31:41 +0300

can I live there please?

Shakespeare & Company, Paris, France

(photo: John Rogers)

flammability

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:39:29 +0300

flammability

Photo

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 20:42:45 +0300

Asko aga tundus tulevat justkui teisest maailmast, ta kodus oli hiiglaslik raamatukogu, suurem osa...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 23:26:41 +0300

Asko aga tundus tulevat justkui teisest maailmast, ta kodus oli hiiglaslik raamatukogu, suurem osa sellest venekeelne, kuna kuulu järgi pärinenud ta isa mingist vanast aadlisuguvõsast, millest suurem osa olla jahvatatud revolutsioonimasinas kondijahuks. Ükskord olid ülemise riiuli raamatud Askole magamise ajal kaela kukkunud, Dostojevskiga vastu kulmu, ütles Asko ise ja naeratas kohmetult.

Jan Kaus, “Hetk”

Photo

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:20:21 +0200

Photo

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:12:17 +0200

Soon my little habit progressed into a full-on dependency. My markings grew more elaborate — I made...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:58:08 +0200

Soon my little habit progressed into a full-on dependency. My markings grew more elaborate — I made stars, circles, checks, brackets, parentheses, boxes, dots and lines (straight, curved and jagged). I noted intra- and extratextual references; I measured cadences with stress marks. Texts that really grabbed me got full-blown essays (sideways, upside-down, diagonal) in the margins. I basically destroyed my favorite books with the pure logorrheic force of my excitement, spraying them so densely with scribbled insight that the markings almost ceased to have meaning. Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

[…]

It’s probably natural, here in the 21st century, to fret over the future of literature — to worry that, in an era in which everyone wants everything to be social and interactive, serious reading will be impossible. Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social — and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states. It might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction: a point of contact that could improve both without hurting either. … Because this yearning for social reading persists. I recently let a friend borrow my copy of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” one of the more compulsively annotated books in my library. Midway through her reading, I needed it back, so she switched to a virginal store-bought copy. The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes.

This gave me an epiphany — a grand vision of the future of social reading. I imagined a stack of transparent, margin-size plastic strips containing all of my notes from “Infinite Jest.” These, I thought, could be passed out to my friends, who would paste them into their own copies of the book and then, in turn, give me their marginalia strips, which I would paste into my copy, and we’d all have a big virtual orgy of never-ending literary communion.

Last month, Amazon announced what could be a landmark in electronic marginalia: public note sharing for the Kindle — Coleridgean fantasy software that will make your friends’ notes appear (if you want them to) directly on your own books. This is exciting but still a few leaps away from my ultimate fantasy of e-marginalia: the ability to import not just your friends’ notes but notes from all of history’s most interesting book markers. Imagine reading, say, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and touching a virtual button so that — ping! — Ernest Hemingway’s marginalia instantly appears, or Ralph Ellison’s, or Mary McCarthy’s. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of “Paradise Lost” and suddenly — zwang! — up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you. (If someone’s handwriting gave you trouble, you’d be able to toggle between script and print.) You could even “subscribe” to your favorite critic’s marginalia — get, say, one thoroughly marked-up digital book every month. Or, if you preferred to keep it contemporary, you could just read along with your friends in an endless virtual book club — their notes and your notes would show up on one another’s e-readers the moment they were made.

“What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text” - Sam Anderson. [He also did the “Year in Marginalia”]

I REPEAT: A BIG VIRTUAL ORGY OF NEVER-ENDING LITERARY COMMUNION. HALLELUJAH!

About libraries: The library … is no mere cabinet of...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:23:00 +0200

About libraries:

The library … is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it’s a world, complete and completable, and it is filled with secrets. Like a world, it has its changes and its seasons, which belie the permanence that ordered ranks of books imply. Tugged by the gravity of readers’ desires, books flow in and out of the library like the tides. The people who shelve the books in [Harvard’s] Widener talk about the library’s breathing— at the start of the term, the stacks exhale books in great swirling clouds; at the end of term, the library inhales, and the books fly back. So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness.

Library: An Unquiet History

mina ja Sirp//there are certain advantages to e-newspaper, I...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:46:20 +0200

mina ja Sirp
//
there are certain advantages to e-newspaper, I must admit

Raamaturiiul on mälutapeet / A bookshelf is the wallpaper of memory

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:37:41 +0200

Mõne inimese halast jääb mulje, nagu oleksid raamatud risu või kola. Ometi on üks tark öelnud, et raamaturiiul on mälutapeet. Raamatuselgade uurimine ergutab kujutlust pööraselt. Uue tuttava riiuli ees seistes saad aimu, kellega on tegemist. Kas ma tulevikus küsin võõrustajalt (daamilt) luba tutvuda tema kompuutri failidega? See oleks kuidagi … ebasünnis.

Mihkel Mutt

An article about paper books and e-books and their relation to the psychophysical nature of humans. The paragraph above stresses the importance of people’s bookshelf in getting to know them and how it excites one’s imagination to run one’s eye over book spines.

***

Raamatuselgadega seoses: selgub, et neile on rajatud terve luuležanr, millest mul aimugi polnud

book spines: there’s a whole poetry genre:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/16/book-spine-poetry-future/

http://100scopenotes.com/2012/04/02/2012-book-spine-poem-gallery-2/

http://orangejuiceinbishopsgarden.com/blog/2012/12/book-spine-poetry/

hah, my favourite:

http://orangejuiceinbishopsgarden.com/blog/2012/12/book-spine-poetry/

blua: Chris Cobb - There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole World...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:43:53 +0200

blua:

Chris Cobb - There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole World (2004), 20,000-book color spectrum

Assorting books by colour seems a bit silly/superficial, but...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:41:20 +0200

Assorting books by colour seems a bit silly/superficial, but it’s one of the (aesthetic) advantages of the “real books”. You can’t use e-readers as interior design elements. But my favourite kind of wallpaper certainly is the bookshelf (healthy or not).

(oh, oh my.)

A practical advantage: it’d take an awful lot of Kindles to support a wonky bed.

On the other hand, it would probably be way more difficult to murder someone with an e-reader than crushing them with a nice heavy bookshelf - a reccurring theme, it seems, in many childhoods, from Valdur Mikita accidentally almost killing his sister to the unfortunate events occuring with the Baudelaire children in the vast archive of “The Hostile Hospital”.

Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel recently discovered a book...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:06:46 +0200

Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel recently discovered a book from the Middle Ages that shows ancient scribes had similar distractions to pet owners of today…

Ha! Cats never stay on the margins.