What makes me think 2008 will be a big year for the future of the book?
Last night in London we went to see the movie of The Golden Compass adapted from the excellent Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. Imagine my surprise when all three trailers shown were about films about books – not just film adaptations but movies in which the book itself stars.
Number one: Inkheart. “Maggie and her father had a special gift when it came to reading stories… but there’s one book they should never have read… ” It’s based on the novels of Cornelia Funke.
Number two: Spiderwick, based on books by artist Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. ‘Their World is Closer Than You Think’.
A child reads: ‘Do not dare to read this book for if you do but take a look…”
The trailer ends with an evil monster growling, “Give me the book!”
And finally, for the adults, Nicholas Cage in National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
Quotes from the trailer: “I need to see the page – there’s a symbol… it’s the
President’s secret book, it contains all the conspiracies…The book exists!”
it’s the Search for the Code of the Bride of Harry Potter & Da Vinci.
Meanwhile I loved The Golden Compass, which has been less compromised by Hollywood e than I’d feared. When the movie was launched I was horrified to hear a radio debate in New York about the dangers of Pullman’s philosophy contaminating innocent children – nobody voiced the view that kids deserved more atheist messages not less.
But I thought the least successful element was the tricksy way they showed the all knowing althiometer at work: swirling dust revealing fuzzy orange images. Only in text can you convincingly describe what it would feel like to know the future.
Will this fascination with the secret world of reading lead to increased sales for conventional tomes or is this the beginning of the final battle between page and screen?! And will it lead to more interest in new ways of mixing literature and image to make networked works of staggering genius?
This Spring experience: IFBOOK! ‘It’s a novel, Bob..but not as we know it.’
Happy New Year
Author Archives: chris meade
if all the sky was paper
Perhaps the only blog featuring a tag cloud in which ‘Assistant Post Mistress’ looms large, The Travelling Bookbinder in Antarctica somehow seems suitable festive reading for the online book lover.
Book artist and travelling bookbinder, Rachel Hazell, is currently working and living in the world’s most famous post office at Port Lockroy, Antarctica. For six white and blue months, Rachel will be working as Assistant Post Mistress and Penguin Monitor. Entries so far include ‘thinking of poetry and missing it’ and ‘thinking about Ali Smith’s enthusiasm for the spare and simple’. Oh and there are instructions on fashioning a book from a sheet of snow white A4.
bothered about blogging etc
I’ve never liked seeing movies in groups. After two hours immersed in a fictional world I dread that moment when you emerge blinking into the light and instantly have to give your verdict.
Personally I want time to mull, and for me a pleasure of private reading is not needing to share my opinion – or know what it is – until I’m good and ready.
I have similar problems with blogging. With such brilliant and articulate colleagues knocking out posts for if:book on a regular basis, I must admit I get nervous about adding speedy contributions. And when I do write words I think might be worth sharing, I wonder if I really want to cast them adrift in such fast flowing waters.
bloggers together – ben vershbow of if:book and cory doctorow of boing boing
I bring this up because the networked book involves active readers happily sharing their thoughts online with others happy to read them.
I dread finding the margins of my e-reader crammed with the scrawlings of cleverclogs, even if I’m free to jump in on their arguments. Having said that, I’m convinced there’s immense potential in building communities of debate around interesting texts. There’s plenty of intelligence and generosity of spirit on the web to counteract the bilge and the bile.
Doris Lessing asks in her Novel prize acceptance speech,
“How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Lessing’s dismay at addiction to the screen amongst the even quite reasonable is a reminder of the importance of working to heal the cultural divide between bookworms and book geeks. This will involve patience on either side as familiar arguments are replayed to wider audiences. We need to talk in plain English about issues that are so much more interesting and culturally fruitful than many even quite reasonable lovers of literature seem to think they are.
talking of poets and sparkles
‘The cast of mind which searches, which questions, which dissents, has a great history. Each society has given it its own form: religious, literary. scientific. Much of the strength of Blake derives from the twofold form which dissent took in his time: rational and inspired… The history of dissent is not yet ended; it does not end. Men die, and societies die. They are not more lasting for being without dissent, they are more brittle: for they are purposeless, because they deny themselves a future.’
So writes Charles Bronowski in his book on William Blake, A Man Without a Mask, quoted by Shirley Dent of the Institute of Ideas in an article on the anniversary of Blake’s birth 250 years ago.
Brilliant, belligerent, barmy Blake has been claimed as a figurehead by all kinds of hippies and politicoes over the years, and was recently cited as ‘The Godfather of Psychogeography‘ by Ian Sinclair for, among other things, seeing angels in the trees of Peckham Rye and the new Jerusalem in leafy north London:
“The fields from Islington to Maylebone,
To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood:
Were builded over with pillars of gold,
Are there Jerusalems pillars stood.”
(This quote from Jerusalem features in Merlin Coverley’s excellent guide to Psychogeography which includes city strollers from Defoe and Poe to Debord and Will Self).
William Blake, the man who wandered through the charter’d streets of London finding in the face of every passerby ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’, who engraved and painted his own books of poems, selling his songs on subscription (or failing to sell them), would have made one hell of a blogger too. I imagine him mashing up maps of Hampstead with his personal mythology, forging a new kind of book on the anvil of his laptop, engaging his community of readers in fervent debate, plying them with animations of innocence and experience.
reeding riting and ranting
It’s the season for literacy statistics. The reading performance of children in England has fallen from third to 19th in the world according to a major assessment. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), undertaken every five years, involved children aged about 10 in 40 countries. Attitudes to reading in England appear poor compared to those of children in many other countries, and have declined slightly since 2001. Children in England read for pleasure less frequently than their peers in many other countries.
But what does that mean? The ensuing debate about declining standards has failed to consider how use of screen and page mingle for young consumers (and creators) of culture. Time spent playing on computers is assumed to be wasted, but how much reading and writing is done on screen? My friends’ thirteen year old daughter spent lots of time on line – but was found to be writing fan fiction short stories and uploading them for peer group response, all with no parental or educational support whatsoever. The key to creating more young readers is to keep books of all kinds in the mix with the other information and entertainment sources children make use of. That’s what’s so important about schemes like Bookstart and Booktime which put exciting books into children’s hands and homes at key moments in their early lives.
As long as children can read proficiently – and the PERLS study shows a decline in interest amongst confident readers rather than plummeting literacy levels – then what really matters is not how many books they use as opposed to websites or tv programmes consumed, but how much information and imagination they glean from their entire cultural diet.
At a meeting last week of FLO, the consortium of ‘Friendly Literature Organisations’ in the UK, we presented the case that agencies like the Poetry Society, Spread the Word and the whole network of literature development agencies in the UK need have no fear at all of the digital. Their work is all about literature not books, about access, interaction and excellence; their skills as curators of their artform are exactly those most prized in the age of attention.
It’s important we keep banging the drum for the living word and look ahead to where stories and poetry go next. That’s the way to ensure that young people grow into creative readers and writers of the world they inhabit.
not drowning but waving
On the Suffolk coast where we stayed last weekend they had been warned of floods comparable to the deluge of 1953 which submerged whole villages and killed hundreds. In the event the high tide wasn’t as high as predicted, although a breach up the estuary submerged the fields beside the river. Local residents were relishing stories of alarmed visitors; they’ve seen it all before round here.
We walk along the river bank and my novelist friend is keen to discuss the future of the book. Her publisher has been circulating their authors with letters about the impact of digitisation; she’s convinced big changes are coming in how novels are distributed, but doesn’t believe there will be much interest in using new media in literary storytelling.
We visit a fish shop by the river that was flooded out. They’d only just opened an extension built at a height recommended by a local fisherman who had told them, “That’s as high as the tide went nine years ago – you’ll be all right.” They weren’t.
Bloggers mix text with still images with moving pictures embedded from YouTube etc. – young people take that media mix for granted, and as consumers we all do, watching tv adaptations of favourite books, using the web to research more about the author to discuss at our reading group. A new generation of more consciously transliterate reader will take it as read that the text is surrounded by researches, images, networks of reader response to the point where these become an entirely integral part of the work of art, the author’s creative voice distinct but no longer so alone.
The flooded fields are rather beautiful and it’s already hard to recall what the landscape looked like before. Nature can adapt instantly to change; it takes longer to redraw the maps. At this week’s if:book:group at DEMOS in London we’re discussing authorship and user generated content. Let’s push off into uncharted waters and see not if but where we float.
books phones screens freedoms
The UK is one of the most watched over societies on earth with CCTV cameras in abundance, and the whole world is waking up to how much retrievable evidence the likes of Google have on us all thanks to our laptops and cellphones. (This spooky walking iphone was seen at the New York Halloween parade last week).
But is the invasion of privacy making our culture more secretive or less? Networks like FaceBook appear to be turning the once wild web into a cosy global village where all know each other’s business and keep an eye out for our digital neighbours and group members.
Privacy and the implications of social networking and user generation on our culture were key topics in a discussion about new technology on the UK internet TV company Doughty Street TV this November 5th, hosted by the Institute of Ideas.
Reading has always been a solitary activity where the individual’s imagination roams at will. There’s been a strange reversal now that book groups and recommendations from chat show hosts – Richard & Judy in the UK, Oprah in the USA – create a tiny pool of recommended bestsellers in the vast and frightening ocean of the unread. Who are the free thinkers now, websurfers or bookbrowsers?
harry potter and the litigants of doom
J.K. Rowling has maintained an admirably strong grip on the creative lives of her fictional creations and their merchandising over the years, for instance insisting on complete control over the writing and casting of the movies and ensuring that Coca Cola put money into literacy projects around the world in exchange for putting HP on their bottles. But the news today that she is suing a publisher for planning to bring out an encyclopedic companion to her books is alarming. Does she really fear that her book will bomb if somebody else ‘steals’ the idea first? Why shouldn’t fans – or even critics – write freely about her work?
The growth of fan fiction, blogging and the exchange of views on favourite books and characters has been a wonderful development of creative reading on the web – and done wonders for the rampant cult of Hogwarts, so it’s a big shame J.K.R hasn’t taken a bold stand for reader interaction with her (copyright) world.
wood book seed key water word
Thanks to James Long of Pan Macmillan for this link to the 370 Day Project, a huge wooden book made by South African artist Willem Boshoff:
CLICK HERE
Boshoff writes:
“I have been playing with the concept of secrecy in my work,” Boshoff said, “because I believe it plays a vital part in nature and in the universe. But I have tried to use it creatively.
“This is an intensely personal statement, and I look upon it in the same light as a book. A book is closed and concealed once it is read until you reopen it, perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime, for a reminder, or for a refreshment…”
Steve Dearden, a key figure on the Literature Development scene in the UK sent me this link to Christopher Woebken’s http://NEW SENSUAL INTERFACES
Finally, Julius Popp’s bit.fall, seems relevant here – it isn’t new, but it’s beautiful.
Bit.Fall – MyVideo
machinimacroatia
The first machinima festival to be held in Europe took place at DMU in Leicester – and in Second Life – on 12-14 October. This quickly-growing genre fuses film-making and computer gaming to provide a quick and cost-effective way to create animated films. Bob Stein’s interview in This Spartan Life is a wonderful example.
Best Experimental award went to Cirque du Machinima: Cuckoo Clock by Tom Jantol of Croatia. it’s great to see something made in this way which has such a thoroughly non-Hollywood aesthetic. There’s amazing potential here for writers – and readers – to create visualisations of work without teams of techies and budgets of millions.