Spines (On Books)

The problem with digital media is that it does not automatically display itself and consequently loses the power of the object to bind to memory. When you don't see the spines of books and records you won't remember the power they have in your life. They merely appear in a list on a screen, tethered to their own ability to have enough power to display themselves.

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My local library opened just a few days ago after being closed since March. There was hardly anybody there, and the floors were completely cleared of chairs and tables as if they had moved out. But I was still able to browse the stacks.

It's interesting to see how books fall in order on a shelf. (A few that I thought were very interesting in their proximity were the Gnostic Bible and books by Marianne Williamson--on the right in the above image). 

Before the internet, and even before computers, looking at spines was in some ways easier than flipping through the old card catalog--or you'd find a better book than the one you were looking for. (For some reason, it seems to work better in libraries than it does in bookstores. Why is library browsing different from bookstore browsing?)

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A few more aphorisms on books:

0023. Sometimes history books (and films) say more about history than history itself. Recording history is like remembering a dream--with fragments stitched together into a narrative that develops a life of their own.

0067. Ultimately, the message is more important than the medium. Good ideas transcend the medium. Once ideas become fixtures of a culture (songs, books, etc.) they no longer need the medium (radio, TV, print, etc.), as they are emblazoned on the psyche and permanently programmed into culture. (3/2002)

0305. The best 'junk' is art, information, favorite books and records, other memories of what you had before. Even then, most of it is sight-unseen and essentially clutter. If no one you know will ever look at it, why save it?

0699. The best advice comes not necessarily from books, but from people that have read lots of them, who can synthesize and connect the ideas within them. (0793)

0760. An exercise in fortuity: when you go the library to find a specific book, and it is not on the shelf, choose another book close to it.

0873. The problem with digital media is that it does not automatically display itself and consequently loses the power of the object to bind to memory. When you don't see the spines of books and records you won't remember the power they have in your life. They merely appear in a list on a screen, tethered to their own ability to have enough power to display themselves.

0926. Music theory as we have known it has tarnished. Younger generations prefer loose structures--things that are more parametric that have biology metaphors (like Frank Gehry and his affinity for carp), and glitchy music with no meter. Some older books I've perused on music and linguistics have become somewhat irrelevant--alas because we seem to care less about those reptilian connections in our brain, now supplanted by the cortex, big data, algorithms, and cybernetics. There's nothing wrong with that, as contemporary art is often all about making it 'wrong.'

1016. People will always have a path dependence on how they consume and process information. Older generations will still covet low-tech things such as paper books and 2-D art on walls. (There will always be bare walls, and will be the first thing to be filled with art. As regards interior design, furniture is sculpture.)

1068. It's not that you read lots of books, it's how you connect them.

1188. Looking at art has become a blur of millions of pieces of content. As a viewer, I prefer looking at photography in galleries, museums and in books where there is less of a tendency to 'share' and more of the appreciation of the moment.

1410. There's a huge difference in saying "I don't watch much television" and being totally influenced by the kind of intelligence TV watching produces. There's virtually no difference in saying "I don't read books" and being totally influenced by the kind of intelligence TV watching produces. In the future, this will include "social media watching" which will include some of all three, but only that which is social in nature, and not necessarily for its focus on discoveries of truth. In the future it will be more: "Look at us all together, not knowing or understanding what we're watching or reading, and it doesn't matter".

1472. The worst thing that happened to the internet was 'peripheral' content, engineered to activate your reptilian brain. That's why people are reading paper books, as they don't have ads (yet).

1479. YouTube is to TV as public book readings were in the past--where someone would read only an excerpt to illustrate the larger context. TV is like a library of books where any book can be opened at random and re-contextualized by other books. After TV, how can we not be open to myriad sources of information (channels), and after the internet how can we not be changed by hypertext and collaborative filtering algorithms? Umberto Eco talked about that in Travels in Hyperreality: that everything is now 'intertextual'. (E.O. Wilson's theory of Consilience is similarly 'intertextual'). Many times I'd be thinking about something I'm writing about, and a connection will be made in a book, a radio show or a podcast, which then might lead to more books and podcasts. It is very fractal in nature: we are evolving in parallel with technology, with hypertext (now a very old technology) creating a sense of informational and experiential unity, while at the same time making it less unified, and always needing us to create that unity, or surrender to algorithms.

1487. Those that aren't into social media might be just as poorly versed as people that are not into reading books. What you want is a full view of media, not one that is truncated on either end.

1495. Computers have obviously informed music, but it is doubtful that computer or social networking has had a significant impact on creativity at the compositional or performance levels, unlike electronic musical instruments that weren't (necessarily) tethered to social media. Musicians can share sound files back and forth in the creative process, but ever since the advent of music social networking, nothing of real substance has come out of it, comparable to other periods in pop music history. It hasn't made people more social or collaborative, at least by the standards of pre-internet songwriting, with the primary reason being that our brains are naturally wired for physical spaces. Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are 'place' cells mapped in the hippocampus, and are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sounds while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don't get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn't imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on 'brain places.'(12/2017)

1625. Paper books are better sources of information because they are not on social media, although contain information that may have been on it, even if that information was originally from a book written before the internet. In some sense, the ink never dries on digital text unless it was printed on a physical form which still exists and was not digitized.

1672. Books give you vocabularies that you wouldn't necessarily get from other sources. Since they take longer to write, there's more thought to word choice than an article written and edited in a few days, or even within an hour. Also, article writers that have read more books have different vocabularies. If you want a small vocabulary, read only social media posts, or just watch video, in which people only access vocabularies that rely on remembering them in the current moment. "Plain-spoken" means a vocabulary has been reduced to a bare minimum, which may have the effect of maximizing group cohesion, and perhaps algorithms running on social networks. The lyrics in pop music do essentially the same thing, but they aren't poetry per se. The medium is the message (lexicon).

1818. Reading 500 books over 10 years has a different result than in 50 years: The forgetting-remembering ratios are different.  On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life:  https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/on-the-uses-of-history-for-staying-alive/

1832. To write and produce a book creates the possibility that someone will open a page at random. Books are more open to synchronicity than other forms of media because you're spending more time with one thing. In some sense TV or video is like a book in that it can be accessed randomly, but the randomness is among many random sources through hypertext, and not confined to one or two books. Digital media made the world a world of shorter threads.

1904. People are on social media because they don't read books or never read them. TV was the first assault on reading, but it's interesting that people are now doing more reading of hardcover books because both TV and the internet have proved empty and too distracting.

1929....When I was first learning to play jazz, I primarily used the fakebooks--in particular The Real Book, an 'illegal' fakebook. Even today, the way I work is to make one of these blueprints at some point in the process. Artists also do this: The sculptor Tony Smith was known to make drawings of sculptures after the models were made, or even after they were erected. Even if the idea has no seed, an artificial seed can be made. #creativity

1949. There are books I know I'll never read. There are also books I’ve started and will never finish. In the middle is the state of my reading life and what I understand about the world. To read widely is better than reading just a few books over and over.  (Studying vs. Reading):  https://medium.com/navigating-life/the-10-books-ill-be-studying-instead-of-reading-in-2020-759b761eb1d0)

1948. When people look for answers to their problems, they tend to live the information in the books they're currently reading. (1/1999, 12/2019)

2088. The bad thing about books, as opposed to other media, is that you live with them longer while you're reading them, but they don't necessarily stay with you longer. Even one sentence--or even one word--can stay with you your entire life. Books can sometimes merely be a way of strengthening already powerful memory.

2101. You can still have schools of thought without deep-reading. Even if you couldn't read you'd live in a society where thinking would have been affected by people reading.