Category Archives: Week 12: Shadow Archives and Archive Theory

Just Remember…

Posted on by
1

We have talked about books and what they mean and signify through bibliography. We have analyzed the physicality of books from the material of the cover and pages to the font styles. We have learned how to appreciate what we see AS a book rather than IN a book. However, how does all of this information from this media transition to our technological age? Remediation! Remediation is the answer to the Web, Facebook, Google, Kindle, and even the format of website designs. Everything originates from the remediation of books because, I don’t know if you know this but, books were a hit back in the day.

Yet, “bookishness” proves that they still matter. It is a form of preservation, expression, and identity. Being bookish is to identify with books in one way or another in an aesthetic sense. However, rather than recognizing books as media of knowledge, they are simply a way to express one’s interest or general aesthetic appeal with books. Therefore, someone could have a shelf of books and have never read a word on any page. Perhaps, these books provide a comfort and fill the empty spaces.

This form of identity powers change. As Dr. Pressman explains in her Bookishness, “Bookishness registers a sense of loss and promotes remembrance” (22). It is a history, a form of record-keeping, as bibliographers. Bookishness contributes to acknowledging lost history like a memorial. While most writers’ imprints on book history (and history in general, for that matter) has been lost or undocumented since we’ve began writing on stone, bookishness is another way to appreciate what we still don’t know. Whatever it may be, a scroll of paper or a scroll through one’s phone, it led us to the concept bookishness. While, yes, bookishness does contribute to the over-commodification of works of art and might take away from the uniqueness of originality, it also brings appreciation for that sense of originality in a digital age.

We are already moving on from simple technologies, which sparks fear in the humanities and society. The other day, I attended a Living Writers event here at SDSU and the author brought up the question of AI. She was not afraid of AI taking over her job because, however ‘intelligent’ AI might be, it has never lived through human experiences. It does not know the feeling of losing someone, it does not know how to brush its teeth (because it doesn’t have any!), it does not know what it means to be human. That is why, even in the face of a digital world, books are still here. Books are still important. Books are human history.

Take a Shelfie!

Posted on by
1

Reading Dr. Pressman’s Bookishness has tied everything taught and read over the semester up with a beautiful, perfect bow. While reading the chapter, it was cool to see all of the authors Dr. Pressman had mentioned and/or assigned for the class. Upon seeing the multitude of authors in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Bookishness, it felt like this semester was a window into Dr. Pressman’s research process and mindset as she had set off to write a book, at first about the “death of the book,” and later became about “bookishness.”

I was intrigued by Dr. Pressman’s explanation and exploration of “shelfies,” which she explains are “a self-portrait in front of one’s bookshelves or a photograph of the books on one’s shelves” (pg 35). This “bookish version of the selfie” (pg 35) is one of many examples of the fetishization of books happening in the social media sphere. Dr. Pressman uses the example of selfies taken with a display of books in the back, which both fetishize the book and can be telling of a person’s outward persona. This concept has evolved to be included in video format from long YouTube video-essays to small clips on TikTok, shelfies remain a part of “digital self-making” (pg 35), just in a newer format. It is rare nowadays to find an “academic” YouTuber without books in their background to appeal to ethos. Yet, despite the dark wood that encases a multitude of books and spans the whole frame, plenty of these videos end up being lukewarm summaries of a situation, book, concept, etc. These disappointing interactions have made me realize how other modes of bookishness appear. Though we’ve looked at bookwork, novel books, artists’ books, books as clothing or jewelry, or more, I forgot that people can still fetishize a plain book. An excellent example that reminded me of this fact was Gatsby’s library of uncut books. People fetishized books then as they do now, but that fetishization has grown and spread into the digital, where everyone is constantly performing their ideal persona and trying to translate that into their reality. 

Week 12: Bookishness

Posted on by
2

Though I was unaware of the term to categorize my thoughts at the time, it was during my undergraduate years when I first began to recognize the phenomenon of bookishness when living with non-humanities students. As my roommate and I sat on the couch and finished the show, Daisy Jones & The Six, we went back and forth on how good the show was and wishing we could experience it for the first time again. Having read the book before it became a TV series adaptation, I offered her my copy to have the reading experience, to which she told me that she wasn’t “into books.” As she headed to her room, I took note of the decorative coffee table books stacked on her nightstand and the movie poster for Call Me By Your Name, another book to screen adaptation.

In a contemporary world sped up by the digital and self-proclaimed “nonreaders,” the book as an object may not carry the same prestige of its early days, but bookishness is alive and well. In reading the beginning of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age by our own Dr. Pressman, I took particular interest in the book as an active agent as it was described, “In this case, “bookishness” suggests an identity derived from a physical nearness to books, not just from the “reading” of them in the conventional sense. The ‘-ishness’ also indicates that objects rub off on us” (Pressman 10). As a culture, we are so deeply engrossed in storytelling and the book whether it be recreating it into visual formats, creating aesthetic objects inspired by it, or replicating it into digital formats. Though someone may not perform the action of reading, it is impossible to understand the full extent of how books have “rubbed off on us.” Whether it is of conscious choice, the book remains near to us whether through material object of the performance of cultural identity and aesthetic. I use my roommate as an example not to judge her personal commitments to literature, but to illuminate ways we experience bookishness in daily practice even if it’s on a subconscious level.

When we began this course, I had great anxiety that books were becoming obsolete. In the ways through which media has progressed in society, book usage dwindles in comparison to technology which most of us can not work, communicate, or leave our homes without. How greatly we rely on technology was just illuminated by the Amazon web browsers outage that prevented countless from work and school. Bookishness, however, gives me hope for the future of books as it has made me realize how deeply books are engrained in our culture that they will not die.

Week 12: Fetishization of the Book and Self-Image

Posted on by
1

Dr. Pressman starts off the first chapter with the statement, “we no longer need books” (pg. 1) in the original sense. A lot don’t use them solely for their original purpose anymore; to explore or have time with one’s thoughts thinking about the book in context. And if we intended that use, I guarantee that we would have still bought books off the shelves because of the cover, thinking that it looked pretty. The clothbound or highly illustrated ones at the Barnes and Noble personally draw me in because I like the sophisticated or elegant look of the book. That is me prioritizing aesthetic and materialistic value over the purpose of the pages I’m buying. 

The fetishization of books has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Everywhere I look, books are being used as content for material objects, titles being printed on everything like a constant ad. They target this need for a reputation of being knowledgeable rather than offering knowledge itself.  On page 8. Dr. Pressman brings up how books are being reshaped and questioned through art, “In bookwork, the book is presented as a physical thing of beauty, complexity, and fascination, not just as a storage container for text. We can’t read the words contained in Pamela Paulsrud’s Touchstones or in Brian Dettmer’s New Funk Standards because pieces of the pages have been cut away, shellacked, and otherwise altered Garrett Stewart identifies bookwork as a distinct genre of contemporary art in which the codex is “demedi-ated,” its medial function stripped away to become sculptural and aesthetic.” Touchstones made me think about how in the modern age, we strip away the knowledge and common form of the book and turn it into a form of paperweight, using the book as a knickknack to showcase what knowledge we want to be seen as having. It reminds me of those fake storage containers that pose as books that people decorate their houses with; I’ll insert a photo. We fetishize books to the point where we don’t care to even physically have the pages of knowledge to go with it anymore if it has an appearance like it. We now view books and anything with their likeness as an accessory to a collection about us, centralizing this focus about ourselves and self-image.