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What I have learned from making my final project:

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Working on my final project has made me look at books in a new way. I wanted to show how a book becomes part of someone’s everyday life, but once I started taking photos, I realized how true that really is. A book is always around in small, quiet moments. It sits on a desk while I study, it travels in my backpack, or it rests beside my morning coffee. Seeing these moments through the camera made me notice how naturally a book fits into my day.

Because I am studying abroad, this project feels even more personal. I only brought a few books with me from Germany, and they have become small reminders of home. When I photograph my project book in different places, I see how it slowly collects pieces of my time here, almost like it is sharing this experience with me. I never paid attention to this before.

Thinking about Walter Benjamin while working on the project also helped me understand his ideas better. He talks about how each book has its own story, and now I see what he means. Even small marks on the cover or tiny folds on the pages show where the book has been. While taking photos, I catch myself noticing these details and thinking about the moments behind them. It makes the book feel alive in a quiet way.

I am also learning how much patience a photo project needs. Sometimes the image I imagine in my head does not match the photo I take. The light might feel wrong, or the scene does not have the mood I want. So I try again, move things around, or wait for a different moment. It takes time, but it also makes me slow down, which I actually enjoy.

Overall, this project is teaching me that books are not just things we read. They move with us, stay close to us, and hold small pieces of our lives without us realizing it. Working on this has made me appreciate those simple, everyday connections a lot more.

Final Project Proposal – A Poem for The Divan of Hafez

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For my final project, I want to write a poem about The Divan of Hafez, that I used for my midterm. When I first saw it, it didn’t feel like just an old object. It felt alive. The red ink, the gold borders, the small tears in the pages all seemed to tell a story. I want my project to be a way of answering that feeling with my own words. My idea is to write a poem that speaks to the book, almost like a conversation. I want to describe what it felt like to hold it, to look at its pages, and to think about all the people who touched it before me. The poem will be in English, but I want to keep the rhythm and softness that I feel when I read translations of Hafez’s. Each part of the poem will focus on something from the manuscript the red ink, the miniature paintings, the worn leather cover. These small details will become symbols for love, time, and memory. The purpose of my project is to show that The Divan of Hafez is more than a historical artifact. It is a living bridge between people and generations. Writing a poem feels like the best way to express that connection.

What I Still Need to Learn for My Final Project

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I’ve chosen a topic for my final project, but I feel like it is a subject that could potentially be sprawling, as almost all subjects surrounding the book are. I need to be careful when researching collectible presses that I do not allow my focus to stray too much. I need to learn the histories of these presses, particularly the Easton Press, as that will be my central focus. I would like to be able to tie this aspect of bookishness into the larger conversation around vintage aesthetics in America, without allowing the project’s scope to expand too broadly. I need to do some research into appreciation of vintage and antique goods as well as consumer preference toward good with vintage aesthetic that are made with modern production techniques.

In this project, I will be doing multiple bibliographies and comparing my findings between editions and evaluating what that could say about the intention behind the creation of these books. I feel like a lot of my research will be hands-on implementation of the things we have learned in class this semester, and that will be very labor and time-intensive. I need to learn what publishing and binding practices were in use at what times, but in the past century and in the more distant history of books. I would like to learn the best way to compare two books bibliographical characteristics.

I am very curious to see how the Easton Press facsimile of the old purchaser-bound folio will measure up in terms of quality of the product, or even if it potentially surpasses the quality of the older book. Since these things are (for the most part) affordable for those that want them, have corners been cut in their manufacturing to keep costs low?

Final Project Proposal

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This project examines how the understanding of literature is changing in the digital age by analyzing memes as a possible new form of digital literature. My thesis is that memes function as a new form of digital literature because they replace linear narrative structures with collective, visual, and participatory meaning production.

The aim of the project is to explore the cultural and cognitive shift from print-based to digital media and to ask what still counts as “literature” in the digital context. I would also like to explore to what extent memes can be compared to books in terms of information transmission. While text is based on language, structure, and argumentation, memes work with images, emotions, and shared digital references.

As a creative project, I would like to create two pages that each deal with the same topic. The first page is more traditional, a standard book page. Instead of an informational text, the second page contains a collection of various memes that report on the same topic. By comparing two forms of presentation of the same topic, on the one hand as traditional text and on the other as a collection of memes, I want to show how the structure, form, and interactivity of digital media change the way meaning is created, communicated, and understood.

Furthermore, I want to show that the transition from print to digital media is not only a technical change, but also a cultural one. Young people today spend a large part of their time with digital content, especially memes, while books are becoming less important for many. Memes are therefore an integral part of our everyday culture and shape how young people think, communicate, and absorb information. Nevertheless, they have hardly been seriously studied in literary and media studies to date.

Battle of the Bands SDSU!!

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Hey guys! I wanted to announce that my band, Girls Got Nerve, will be competing in this year’s SDSU Battle of the Bands for the chance to perform at Greenfest as an opener at the California Coast Open Air Theatre, which is located here on campus. Seven bands will be competing on December 3rd from 6-8:30 at the student union in the Montezuma Hall (where orientations are held for students). It’s gonna be a cool way for you guys to see some SDSU bands and get introduced to new music! I hope to see some of you guys there!:)

Here I have attached a pic of us wearing handcrafted outfits made by our guitarist, Toula.

Zine Workshop -Extra Credit-

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I’m so happy that I attended the Zine workshop hosted by Vide. He did a great job bringing people together in a purposeful way to spread his knowledge on making zines and memes. I had a great time sitting with fellow students, crafting together in a collaborative environment. We would ask each other for opinions and share crafting materials. Although im not necessarily a crafty person, it was so cool to go through magazines and newspapers, collecting what I thought would serve me in my zine. I learned that zines are excellent ways to share information and spread messages. They are a form of storytelling and learning how to fold paper to make a book, connected to our class. I ended up making a goofy little book about my best friend/bandmate, and I gave it to her as a silly gift. Thank you, Vide, for putting on a cool event and bringing people together!

Bookishness

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This week we read Professor Pressman’s Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age Intro and Chapter 1 and honestly, very fascinating and intriguing. I know we have discussed bookishness in class before but I feel as though this introduction and first chapter made me understand it even more and honestly, I see myself as a bookishness person and I never realized it and I also never realized how much we truly do fetish this object. I also never realized that our deep love for books also change how we craft the book like its physical aspect which is what professor Pressman talks about in her work. “Bookishness affects literature not only at the level of content and story, but also in form and format.”(Pressman 22). This sentence made me remember about our times in special collections where we would see a lot of great books that didn’t really LOOK like books. We saw how someone made a story with a can, as well as a copy of Dracula no more than maybe half an inch big and wide as well as a constellation book that folded into pyramids which are 3D shapes. We as a society love this object so much that we are willing to break the rules of how a book should be created physical as well as written “appropriately” because changing the formatting and format of a books content is a huge deal and is something that should not be overlooked at all. Content is important, but we must ask ourselves as to why our author created this book the way they wanted and why did they decide to format the content into weird formats. Format and formatting is something that has interested me from the start of class because I have read countless books where authors tend to let their creativity run loose with formatting. I always found it “unformal” as a child when I read books with those formats and I often labeled them as books not worth reading since they became silly in my eyes. Seeing it now though, its creative liberty and freedom of expression which I think is beautiful and something that should not be overlooked which is ironic considering its a physical aspect in which you are constantly looking at when reading.

Looking back at my life, I remember reading pop-up books, but never really asked myself as to why it was created that way or rather; how someone was obsessed with books so much that they wanted to literally bring it to life. Books are great and seeing how humanity is obsessed with them(me too) I cant wait to see what people are going to share later down the line!

Collecting as a Way of Remembering

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When I read Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library, one line really stayed with me. He writes, “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” (p.60) I read that twice. It felt so true. Collecting isn’t just about owning things it’s about holding on to moments that meant something once.

Benjamin talks about how his shelves look messy but how that mess has its own kind of order. I love that idea. It reminds me that memory doesn’t work in straight lines either. It’s full of little pieces that somehow belong together, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else. Maybe that’s what a collection really is, a space where all those pieces can live side by side.

When I think about my own things, I realize I do the same. My computer is full of old photos, half-written notes, and random screenshots I can’t bring myself to delete. They might not look important, but every one of them connects to a moment I don’t want to forget. It’s a kind of digital version of Benjamin’s bookshelf, just with files instead of books.

What I like most about Benjamin’s thought is that he doesn’t see disorder as something bad. Sometimes chaos just means that something is alive. Maybe that’s what collecting really is a way of keeping our memories close, even when we don’t know exactly why.

Forms of the Book and The Mind of the Reader

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Over time, in our class discussions, I’ve come to realize that the nature of the book isn’t so much linear as it is cyclical. The history of the book works similarly, operating cyclically, and affecting society, thereby causing remediation that we may sometimes mistake for “new”. However, in reality, many of the digital fears we have now, for example, AI today, were also shared by people in the past. “In the years leading up to the new millennium, fears of the digital were articulated as threats to the book.”(Pressman 26). Professor Pressman mentions how the book wasn’t always the thing threatened for obsolescence but in fact the catalyst of fear and change:

“In a pivotal scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), set in fifteenth-century Paris during the emergence of the printing press, Victor Hugo poses the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the narrative embodiment of the Catholic Church, alongside a book and a view of Notre Dame: ‘The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic edifice for some time in silence, then extending his right hand, with a sigh, towards the printed book which lay open on the table, and his left towards Notre-Dame, and turning a sad glance from the book to the church,—‘Alas,’ he said, ‘this will kill that.’ ’1
The statement ‘this will kill that’ expresses a belief that new media (here, the book) will
destroy older, established forms of knowledge production and distribution (here, the church).”(27)

This fear of the new destroying the old is not new, especially when it comes to The Book. The church, back then, had an incredible amount of power and influence in the world. It feels as though the expansion of information and the book itself were seen as potential catalysts for the church’s downfall in terms of stripping its power that it had on people. For now, the information and potential influence weren’t limited through the mouth of the church or kings who were likely loyal to the church as well.

Today, books now come in various formats, to the point where you can buy a version of a book that’s being read to you. AI now has the capabilities of writing fiction if prompted to, and mimicking the way we write. We have now, more than ever, become a society that relies on technology for many things, and that is not limited to literature as well. But it is the forms that the book takes that can illuminate perhaps what we, as a society, are now utilizing, prioritizing, and finding comfort in. But a paradox forms in that it is this exact shift that creates reactions to preserve and continue to nurture the book into the Digital Age.

The Thrill of Owning

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The idea of collecting books in a personal library without reading them, just for the thrill of having it, paints books in a new light as objects instead of content to be read. According to Walter Benjamin in his book Illuminations it’s not about the books at all, it is about the thrill of acquiring them and the feeling of owning them. It always comes down to ownership and power. People feel powerful and more intelligent if they have many books in their possession. It’s the feeling of looking around in your gallery knowing that they are all yours even though most of the books sit unread, for example, “to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, ‘And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?’ “Not one tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sévres china everyday?(Benjamin, 62)” This quote places books in the same category as fancy china that sits in a cabinet, only to be used for special occasions, or never at all. This is powerful because it argues that books are merely material objects to be collected. This deeply corresponds with the idea of bookishness and shows books to be material items, separating them from what they hold inside.
I remember the first day of class many classmates spoke of their book collections and how they hadn’t even read most of them, and I related to that. We collect books for the feel, smell, touch, look, and physicality. The thrill of acquiring. The feeling of power from owning them. This is all very human of us, our hunting and gathering nature. I strongly believe humans will never stop collecting books, even in a fully digital age. Books will always be a collectors item, an object, separate from its content. Humans love books as objects, even if we don’t even use them to get our knowledge.