Cooking the blooks
Apr. 4th, 2006 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The BBC tells us that a cook named Julie Powell has won the Blooker Prize with a book that began as a blog, "365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen". Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu, which organised and sponsored the prize, is quoted as saying: "Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology". What is a blook? It's a blog that turns into a book, the way, in evolution, mammals went back into the sea and became fish again. Except they didn't really do that, although undoubtedly some of us still enjoy a good swim.Julie's cookblook sounds like a slightly less interesting version of a book I saw someone reading on the subway recently, Everything I ate: a year in the life of my mouth by Tucker Shaw. Tucker took Polaroids of his food every day for a year, in a project which could have started as a blog, but could equally have been an On Kawara art project or even something more extreme, like Tehching Hsieh's
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Piece).The almost autistic obsessiveness of such blog-like, art-like recording projects (Cornelius's food blog also springs to mind) isn't really very book-like, but as someone who loves neologisms I'm going to humor this idea that blooks are the new books, and that blogs are the future -- no, wait, the past! -- of the book. It chimes with a very interesting luncheon visit I made a couple of weeks ago to the Institute for the Future of the Book in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Someone called Dan Visel had invited me to come in and chat. I found myself in a kitchen overlooking the sandy back courtyard of a plain clapperboard building on North 7th Street. There were about six men sitting around a kidney-shaped table. One of them was older than the others and looked like a delicate Vulcan. "I expect you're wondering why you're here?" he said. "Yes, I've been very trusting," I replied, wondering if I was about to be held hostage by a resistance movement of some kind.
Well, it turned out that the Vulcan was none other than Bob Stein, who founded the amazing Voyager multi-media company, the reference for intelligent CD-ROM publishing in the 90s. One of my friends from that heady time, Eric Swenson, actually had one of his Blam CD-ROMs issued by Voyager.
So, for the next 90 minutes or so, I heard all about the Institute for the Future of the Book (or if:book, as they like to call themselves) and its projects. It seems they're assuming that the book itself is already over, and that it will survive now as a metaphor for intelligent conversation in networks. Bob's great delight with Voyager was to discover that books could jump to life with voices and films and interactivity. He doesn't look back with much nostalgia at the paper-card-glue book. In fact, he's looking so far forward that he seemed rather disappointed with the recent Wired piece in which I said that the artforms (theatre, dance, live rock, performance art) which can't be digitized and put up on a network are getting more important precisely because of their resistance to digital commodification. For Bob, Vulcan eyes fixed on some far horizon, thinks that everything will enter the digital domain sooner or later. (if:book's forthcoming Sophie software is oriented towards helping that happen.)
I'm more inclined to think the flow between bits and atoms is two-way. Sure, I do consider myself, in some sense, a post-book writer. And yes, a blogger is just a writer with a cooler name. Click Opera is pretty much where I want my writing to be. Yet I have no objection to the idea that a book may one day come of it, a (necessarily limited) hard copy. This year I've contributed writing to a blook of sorts, a post-web book called Fotolog.book (the dot book bit is a perfectly blookish statement) made of photos and comments people posted to photo-sharing website Fotolog. It captures between hard covers some of the liveliness and spontaneity of internet life, but it weighs a ton, and of course you can't leave comments in the margins. Well, you can, but nobody will see them.if:book's blog might also become a blook one day, although, given Stein's views on atoms, it would be somewhat ironic, and somewhat pointless. Personally, I already find it rather heavy; its concern with legal and technical issues leaves my eyes feeling slightly lead-lidded. It's all a bit grown-up, this talk of frameworks and standards, of DRM, RDF, SSN, URI, API and XML. But I can tell you, should you be preparing a food blook, that we ate falafel sandwiches prepared by a nearby take-away run by Palestinians. They were tasty, and not digital at all.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 02:08 pm (UTC)blogger, blagger, bragger, dragger, drugger...
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Date: 2006-04-04 04:49 pm (UTC)Not a blook, though. A smap, perhaps (score + map.... alright, alright, that sounds crap.)
der.
Funny
Date: 2006-04-04 05:14 pm (UTC)That's what i said yesterday.. maybe we all need a bit of exercise. I personally enjoy a good book i can rip to pieces with my pen and decorate with colorful post-its (preferably pink.. or lime green).
Blooks
Date: 2006-04-04 05:44 pm (UTC)What I worry about is that the merits of both mediums will become obscured by the future-past narrative, which assigns value like any other. The only book I have ever read electronically is "Anna Karenina," on my Palm Pilot, and I much preferred it to the hard copy. But what of art books? Images on the page are so much better than on the screen. I thought Fischli and Weiss' "Visible World" was better as a book than a sculpture, and the experience I had "reading" it would not have been the same had it been a slideshow generously offered by some museum.
As a sometime advocate for the poor, I wonder how futuristic blooks figure in the lives of those without computers, still a significant number. As everyone knows, the limited time available on library computers is hardly enough to satisfy curiosities. I wonder what the future of the book looks like for the digitally challenged, indeed. Not to mention, hello, environmental issues surrounding the expansion of digital equipment. Plant fibers come together and separate with much less energy than plastics and chips and batteries.
As the world moves toward the digital information consumption, in my opinion an experience fraught with distraction, I hope we retain a kind of objectivity that allows us to understand both the benefits and the limitations of various media.
-Matthew arrowlikemouth.blogspot.com
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 05:54 pm (UTC)I said that the artforms (theatre, dance, live rock, performance art) which can't be digitized and put up on a network are getting more important precisely because of their resistance to digital commodification.
I still think your take on this phenomenon is spot on. I'll spare you the old tv/radio example, but suffice it to say that these things seem to find a way to coexist or even enhance one another, rather than assume some methodical, linear progression towards phasing each other out. Such a view seems to be a mechanistic, old fashioned way of looking at the process, to be honest.
Case in point: I'm currently relishing the little details designing my own book (blook?), trying to make it as book-like as possible, with embossing, foil stamping, fancy endpapers, etc. I suppose it's more of a "book" than a book.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 06:07 pm (UTC)agog and nook are a-okay.
what would not offend my ears would be if you, or perhaps my Russian drunk-poet roommate, would convert Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities into audio bedtime stories for me. I'll trade my rougish good looks [er?] for books on tape.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 06:10 pm (UTC)Dan Visel, Van Disel, Vin Diesel...
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Date: 2006-04-04 06:37 pm (UTC)Yum.
They used to have really good lotus root at Supercore, but then they got rid of it cos it was a fringe item.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 06:40 pm (UTC)I don't think books will entirely go away. The one problem I see with selling digital books is the possibility of the winnowing down of title selection due to the continuing obsolescence of rapidly improving technology (will Louÿs' Songs of Bilitis or Roussel's Locus Solus make the cut when the next big leap in digital media happens?
Besides, too many of us middle-aged sorts enjoy the tactile pleasure of holding and reading a book on the couch with a glass of wine, theories and predictions be damned. Today's digitized kids might come around to feeling that way as they age, too—if nothing else, but for the sake of their eyesight.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 06:53 pm (UTC)we like books, but we will die. immortal children with laser eyes will find no use for them, i think.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 07:08 pm (UTC)You can actually pick up girls with these things?
Re: Blooks
Date: 2006-04-04 07:35 pm (UTC)500 years ago this document was part of an earlier high tech revolution: mechanical type and the spread of literacy in the west. Paper endures. As someone who values historical context to enrich my worldview, I worry that the dark side of digital is information loss due to rapidly changing technology without backward compatibility. Stewart Brand raises this in The Long Now project.
I don't think we can or should save everything. Lots of on-line content is as ephemeral as cherry blossoms. But how do we back up what is worth saving and keep it accessible for the next 500 years? (I can't even access zip disks less than 10 years old.) Any fresh thinking on this?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-04 08:35 pm (UTC)I don't understand why so many content creators want to invent the "Next book." Books don't need replacing. A new creation should be just that, a new creation, springing from the heads of what Joves there are--not a replacement for anything, but a thing with a life of its own, blog or blook or whatever else there may be.
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Date: 2006-04-04 08:44 pm (UTC)http://paultan.org/archives/2006/01/01/china/
http://www.ispub.com/ostia/index.php?xmlFilePath=journals/ijto/vol2n1/eggs.xml
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Date: 2006-04-05 12:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-05 01:10 am (UTC)Of course, as I pointed out in the post, the cunning thing about the concept of the blook is that it posits the book as coming after the blog, not before it, as some evolutionist of media forms would probably do. In this reading, blogs are the past of the book, not its future.
The new thing, the post-digital thing, in this cunning spin, is... the same old books, with a new name. Well, an extra letter in their old name. L for, hmm, "log", I suppose. But books are already made from logs, aren't they? Pulped logs? So perhaps the L stands for "lite"? Books lite?
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Date: 2006-04-05 05:58 am (UTC)I'm driving out there with a thermometer.
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Date: 2006-04-05 03:16 pm (UTC)In my day job, I deal with the issues of the digitization of cultural heritage materials and one thing that is often in discussions such as this is coming up with an encompassing definition of (forgive the obvious!) "What is a book?"
There are those who focus on the tactile/sensuous aspects ("I love sitting ina warm bath with a glass of wine and a good book"), there are the visual aspects (consider ANY of the so-called artist's books that encompass the ridiculous to the sublime), the "intellectual content carrier" idea that diminishes the physical object, and finally, a viewpoint that I have heard expressed only vaguely here: the book as a mechanical device for information storage and retrieval. And it is a truly random access device.
It is important to remember the grossly physical aspect of books: it informs our view of them as aesthetic or intellectual objects. I think that this unexpressed reverence of the durability of the physical device lies at the desire of every budding wordsmith to "redefine literature with my latest spewings" or, in the case of our present discussion, my latest "blook." Initmations of immortality, perhaps? BTW, mightn't the "blog+film/movie" be a "blilm?"
And as a performing/recording musician, I really appreciated your remark about "that the artforms (theatre, dance, live rock, performance art) which can't be digitized and put up on a network are getting more important precisely because of their resistance to digital commodification." Much of what I do would not be possible without the digital technology to produce it, but I can still play it, live, in public.
Ta!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-05 04:28 pm (UTC)I know what you mean...
Date: 2006-04-06 09:12 am (UTC)I have seen this with kids so much older than my son, and yet my son can identify not only trees, but just the little details of the living world around all of us outside.. he is however when he sets his mind to it, extremely interested in studying the "help file" for "Space Cadet pinball".
He studied it until he could coach me to help him draw a large scale model of the game: he knew the names of everything! Once he did this I gave him an anatomy diagram because I couldn't see such abilty to study something go to waste.. after all he's only turning 5 this month.
Maybe some are more prone to seeing the shadows for what they are-- perhaps that's those of us still puttering about in the garden.
Who can say?