Tag Archives: Bookishness

Childlike Wonder

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If this class and these last two readings have taught me anything, it is to approach the physical aspects of books, their history, and subsequent possible future with a childlike wonder. In the humdrum of certain classes, and constant pressure to be serious about the grades my perfectionist brain yearns to achieve, as well as the social expectations bearing down on my shoulders to be a serious adult, my research/assignments—while still interesting—become drained of color. The information and the search for information feels more like a means to an end rather than the end itself, and the process itself becomes a challenge to rush through and away from. There is no genuine wonder within my learning sometimes.

But with the experience I have now, and especially this quote from Unpacking My Library, “Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals-the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names…everything said from the angle of a real collector is whimsical,” I am reminded to see with the eyes of a child just discovering something (Benjamin 61-62). It is this childlike wonder that carved the path for the “Bookwork” mentioned on pages 8-9 in Dr. Pressman’s book intro. The sculptors utilized what Benjamin describes as “childlike modes of acquisition.” They touch and shape the book into something new, coming at it with a childlike wonder that makes it their own.

The midterm and these readings made me realize I am still able to have that childlike wonder without the seriousness clouding the work. I can discover things and be excited from those discoveries, and not do it just for a grade but because I genuinely am in awe from the information. It was the physical inspection—the holding, touching, and the turning of the pages—of Copernicus’s book, along with the discovery of questions, that reignited that childlike wonder spark in my brain. I wasn’t sorting through a vast amount of research with no direction, but instead a path that was being revealed to me for the first time that made me want to dig deeper.

It’s like going from being oxygen deprived to your lungs being drenched in O2. I felt excitement and wonder during school for the first time in a long time, and I’m glad these readings actually put it into perspective for me. Now going forward, I’ll make sure this child like wonder stays with me, no matter what I choose to do in the future.

Week 13: Unpacking My Library – Walter Benjamin

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In “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin writes about the experience of unpacking his books after they had been stored away for a long time. What struck me most is how personal his relationship with his books feels. He says that for a real collector, “it is he who lives in them.” I love this idea because it makes books feel alive, almost like a home that holds all of someone’s memories and experiences.

Benjamin doesn’t talk about books in a practical way, like something to read and then put away. Instead, he sees them as companions that carry stories beyond the ones written inside. Each book has a history of where it came from, how it was found, and what moments in life it connects to. I find that beautiful because it shows how reading and collecting are emotional acts. They are about memory and attachment, not just knowledge.

When I was reading this essay, I started thinking about my own small collection of books. Since I came to SDSU for my semester abroad, I only brought a few with me, but each one reminds me of something. One book reminds me of home and reading late at night in my room. Another reminds me of a trip with a friend. So when Benjamin describes unpacking as a process full of memories, I really understand that feeling. It’s not just about putting books on a shelf. It’s like meeting old friends again.

I also liked how Benjamin admits that collectors are a bit chaotic. He says that every passion has some chaos in it, and I think that’s true. His shelves aren’t perfectly organized, but maybe that’s what makes them real. Sometimes the disorder of our books reflects who we are better than neatness ever could.

In the end, Benjamin’s essay feels like a love letter to books and to the act of collecting them. He isn’t showing off his library; he’s showing what it means to live with books, to grow up with them, and to see a part of himself inside them. I think that’s what he means when he says the collector “disappears inside” his library. Maybe he’s saying that the books we love become a part of who we are — and that we find pieces of ourselves in their pages.

Nearness – Staying Close to Books in a Digital World

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“Bookishness is about maintaining a nearness to books.” (p. 10) Nearness. There’s something quiet but powerful in the way Pressman uses that phrase. She isn’t talking about how much we read or how deeply we understand a text. She is talking about something simpler. Being close to books, keeping them around us, letting them shape the spaces we live in. And that idea immediately made me think about why books still matter in a world where so much has moved to screens.

For Pressman, this physical closeness becomes a kind of language. The book doesn’t need to be opened to speak, it communicates simply by being there. A shelf full of novels, a stack on a nightstand, even a single book placed on a desk can create a certain atmosphere. It changes how a room feels. It changes how we feel in the room. Nearness becomes emotional. It suggests comfort, stability, or even a small sense of grounding in a digital world that is constantly shifting and moving. But Pressman pushes this idea even further. She reminds us that bookishness isn’t only about what we surround ourselves with, it’s also about who we become through it. “‘Bookishness’ comes from ‘bookish,’ a word used to describe a person who reads a lot (perhaps too much). When coupled with ‘-ness,’ the term takes on a subtle new valence.” (p. 10) Suddenly bookishness is not an action but a state of being. It becomes part of how we present ourselves, how we are read by others and how we imagine our own identity.

And I see this everywhere. Books on shelves in the background of Zoom calls. So-called “shelfies” on social media. Pinterest boards full of libraries people will never visit, saved simply because of the aesthetic. It’s all an attempt to stay close to books, even when the books themselves have become partly digital and partly symbolic. Nearness moves from the physical world into the online one and the objects we keep or the images we share still say something about us. What I find interesting is how natural this feels. We don’t usually think about why a room looks different when it has books in it. We don’t question why a shelf can make a space feel warmer or more personal. But Pressman makes visible something we usually take for granted. Books shape the environments we build and the selves we project. To be “bookish” today doesn’t mean reading all day. It means choosing to stay close to the idea of the book. Its presence, its weight, its quiet promise of time and attention.

In a world where everything is fast and fleeting, nearness becomes its own kind of resistance. It’s a small way of holding on to something steady. And maybe that’s why bookishness feels so relevant now. Not because we are reading more, but because we still want our lives to feel like there’s space for books in them.

Revisiting My Fascination with the Book

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This week’s readings, especially Bookishness have forced me, in many ways, to return to the very first blog post of the semester in which described my own relationship to the book. Books and bookshelves have long been a staple in my life, and I have lugged around the same collection of books from apartment to apartment to house to house and in six or so moves left and right across the country. I feel very much like the collector in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library.” I’ve been collecting first editions and rare books for a long time, and I’ve come to them in myriad ways. Often, it is books that somehow, bafflingly, garner “no interest, no bid, and the book was put aside,” but unlike Benjamin’s protagonist, I did not wait but leapt at the opportunity to find a book “in the secondhand department and [benefit] from the lack of interest” (65). I once found a 1929 first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms in an antique store for $12. On the free books shelf in the lounge in the Arts and Letters building I have found, rather recently, a first edition, dust jacketed copy of The Things They Carried, a first edition of Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead, and a few weeks ago in a thrift store in Idaho I found a signed (!!) first edition copy of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land for four bucks.

These things carry immense value to me beyond the monetary. In large part, this is due to the culture of bookishness and the time I was brought up in. For much of my adolescence the conversation surrounding print’s impending death was very loud and very present: “A history of normative values associated with literary media … transferred to a new site of conflict: print versus digital” (Pressman 16). As a young boy you naturally must choose a side in any argument or debate or conflict, and so I chose print. In the midst of this conversation, it is important to note that I grew up extremely rural and had dial-up internet until 2012, which very likely swayed things for my mother and I, making it impossible to quickly download files, play games online, watch YouTube, etc. We did not even get cell service at the house. You had to walk up to the top of the hill for to get bar or two.

Regardless, I became a staunch supporter of printed media. I begged my mother for a Sports Illustrated subscription in the misguided belief that I could be the one to stave off the demise of the printed magazine. “If they don’t print it, and only post it online, how will I read?” I remember lamenting.

“The history of the book is about power and politics,” as Dr Pressman writes in chapter one of Bookishness (33). And, at the time, only the powerful and the well-off and the urban could afford the kind of all-the-time connectivity we saw have such a rapid uptick in the aughts and 2010s. I was none of those, and so for me, printed media became a thing that I consumed because I was poor, because we could not afford then the fancy newfangled things that people were claiming would upend the world order. It is interesting that this has now flipped on its head, that many of the poorest in this nation and around the world have access to internet and the technologies that were once unobtainable. That now, following the “death” many in the news once warned us of, print is doing just fine. It is not the same as it was, and many magazines and publishing houses have shuttered, but there is still a market for these things I once feared would become obsolete.

Through all this, I have held on to these books (and added many more), though their meaning has changed over the years, and, like Banjamin’s protagonist, these books have come to me by many avenues. There is a level of intellectual projection done by them. The crowd I often find myself surrounded by is frequently shocked that I read at all, let alone that I am a writer. There are memories in them. Many were passed down from my mother, who stole them from the LD Bell High School library in 1979. Her name is still on the card on the frontispiece. They have been gifts from friends, colleagues, family members. I have found them on the street. I have spent amounts I wouldn’t like to disclose on a few of them. I have stolen others from friends’ libraries. I have written some of them. My friends and my teachers have written others. I have come to them or they to me in many ways, but what is central is that these books remind me of a world into which I was born and which now seems as if it hardly exists at all.

The digital age has completed its ascent, and I latch on to the book out of nostalgia, familiarity, or fear. There is something comforting in looking at their many-colored spines as I write this. I could not have that same comfort on a device, no matter how they rearranged the front screen of the Books app. All of these varied feelings simply cannot be applied to a phone, to a screen, something that when we buy it, we know will someday soon become obsolete, because what the digital grants us in access it strips from us in permanence.

Will my grandchildren one day fire up my laptop and go through my files, watch some of the movies I have downloaded, play some of the computer games? Hell no. Let’s not lie to ourselves. But I do like to believe, if only because I have done it, that one day they might lift a book out from the shelf that was once in their grandfather’s collection, and open it and find his name and turn the same pages that my hands have turned. There is some kind of immortality in that, no?

Week 13: Collection, Capture, and Consent: Connecting Our Learnings with My Research

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Dr. Pressman (Bookishness) and Walter Benjamin (“Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting”, trans. Harry Zohn) each describe the fetishism of book ownership, in which symbolic value is attached to the book. I am considering the symbolic value of the book (and the bookish body) in the context of surveillance culture, and in particular relation to my research on sexual violence in fandom convention spaces. I use this post as an opportunity to connect some dots between this week’s bookish readings and my research, as I am presenting it at a conference in a few days.

Benjamin writes that, “for a collector, . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects” (67). “Ownership” as intimacy suggests a close spatial proximity between that which is collected and she who collects, a “nearness” which Dr. Pressman shows is remediated through digital book imagery (Bookishness 10, 35). Following Susan Sontag’s situation of U.S. photography traditions in the colonial pursuit of collecting (On Photography), I consider the practice of (often nonconsensual) convention photography to be a means of “collecting” bodies as datified archival “objects.” By this I mean that the nonconsensual photo documents not only the proximal relationship between the bodies of photographer and photographed subject, but also the photographer’s greater liberty to determine this proximity/nearness through the functions of camera technology. Where the body cannot be literally sexually possessed, the body can be remediated into a collectable visual representation of (forced, coerced, or consensual) compliance with being objectified through the act of being photographed.

For convention culture, this means that the visual archive of the convention overwrites the lived experiences which occur around and beyond the moment of photography / compliance / archival. I am using the convention archive as an entry-point into a larger argument about how surveillance and the “collection” of body-data shapes pop culture practices more broadly. As a class, we have found that the book is a body, and that the body is a book. To build from Nick Couldry’s framework in Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (2003), I want to show how rituals of collecting and archiving serve to “categorize” each body as book or as reader – object or subject – and “naturalize” the book/body as representative of this power relationship. The book and the body are encoded with symbolic value. Dr. Pressman describes the use of the book as a status symbol in the U.S., where reading inherits historic conscription to that position which is “Western, Judeo-Christian, middle class or at least instilled with ideals of bourgeois mobility” (Bookishness 32). This status of reader/archiver is exclusive: the reader is made dominant by their potential to be able to read (they do not necessarily need to read, though this practice would do the ritual work of naturalizing inequality).

Dr. Amira Jarmakani’s Digital and Networked Feminisms course has been a rich complement to our Books class this semester, as each course has offered perspectives on these symbolic and political powers which networked actors produce. Readings on dataveillance have led me to consider the ways in which archival and “collection” practices necessarily datify identities and bodies, producing boundaries and value through containment. When used as a tool (to borrow Amber Rahman’s term) to reinforce violent institutional relationships, archival technologies might also act as technologies of surveillance. Birth certificates, state identification documents, and police drone footage – each what Lisa Jean Moore and Paisley Currah (2015) call a “surveillance apparatus” –archive individuals as data units in value-encoded systems (“Legally Sexed: Birth Certificates and Transgender Citizens” 60). The “intimacy” or “thereness” of book collection is perhaps violently remediated through these surveillance practices, which datify people into readable data units that can be ‘opened’ for interrogation at any time. Surveillance is a violent form of archival and meaning production which can be understood as an extension of colonial reading and bookishness.

Benjamin describes that “[t]he most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (60). This containment takes on a grim cadence when we consider the collector as a colonial amasser and the archived “individual items” as humans. Jean-Christophe Cloutier more succinctly criticizes this colonial archival framework by critiquing the language of “capture” (Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature 7). My research is also moving towards grappling with collection as an extension of colonialism and surveillance (each key to collection’s obvious grounding in capitalism).

This leads me to my final project for our class, which will mediate the erasure of personhood that is produced when bodies are collected or captured through the colonial “surveillance apparatus” of the medical record. I am deliberating if my project will suggest resistance more obviously, or if its existence will itself serve as critique. Either way, I am inspired by the postcolonial archival critiques which Marlene Manoff describes in “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines”, where creators “reinterpret and recontextualize [colonial archival] information and thus call into question the colonial version of events” (16). I hope that my work on surveillance and sexual violence in the convention space can open up these conversations on the politics of materiality in fandom and pop culture studies more broadly.

Bookishness

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When reading Bookishness, I was shocked with how I started to remember this fetishization of the book as a physical object. I remember when I was younger I had an obsession with the physical object of a book. I had to hold/read it a certain way so it wasn’t damaged, I wouldn’t let people borrow my beloved books, I had a book stamp that printed my name into every book I owned, and I would even pack my books a certain way on a road trip to ensure they were not damaged. I can think of so many other absurd examples of my own relationship to bookishness back then, but none of these things apply to my today as I write and fold all the pages in my books- coffee stains and all. I wonder what changed in my bookishness, could be a lot of things, but it’s interesting to read this book in context of thinking of my own bookishness actions. Although I was aware about these aspects of bookishness and the obsession with the object, I had never thought about it in the context of increasing digitization.”So what happens when the book get digitized and bookish culture goes digital- when the word ‘book’ may or may not refer to a material object?” (Pressman, 3). This question highlights the transition from bookishness being physical and now digital- something 12 year old me would not understand. Bookishness is in the physicality of the book, but what happens when we no longer have that? These ideas are being reimagined, and I can see how my own relationship with it has changed over time as books have become digitized. I read on a kindle almost every night before bed, but 6 years ago I refused to read on a kindle as I felt I was betraying my physical books- Bookishness.

When I continued with this reading I also found it fascinating when reading about the Mac BookBook. “My Mac BookBook displays the book to be a powerful form of residual media actively shaping digital culture” (Pressman 7). I found this idea of a Mac BookBook the epitome of Bookishness itself: a digital device pretending to be a physical book. Not only does this device make a book appear to be something its not, but it shows something that is no longer there. I found this very fascinating and also shocking. The aesthetic of the book went so far, you wonder why it was changed in the first place. It makes me think that people need change but are also afraid of it- as they hold on to the physicality of the book even when the Macbook was present. Bookishness is more than an aesthetic, its also a lifestyle, as I discussed before I was a part of this before I even knew it. The amount of bookishness themed things I owned: book stamps, book earrings, book t-shirts, etc. I was matching this bookishness of wanting to be near the physicality of the book but I did not even realize or know why- I am not sure I know now. The materiality doesn’t change the content: the words in the book are still the same. But at the same time the materiality of the book feels like its a part of its content.

Take a Shelfie!

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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. 

Bookishness – A Responce to a Culture in Transition.

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Wow, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first chapter of Jessica Pressman’s book Bookishness. I loved the words and all the wonderful pictures added for our viewing pleasure. It really helped to paint the picture of what bookishness truly is, a phenomenon of people fetishizing the look, feel, and idea of a book in the digital age, where we don’t need them anymore. Although the need might be gone, the want is still apparent. I loved how Pressman italicized these two words: Need and want. We dont need books anymore in our day-to-day lives, and this drastic change is what led to our even stronger want, desire, and fetishization for them.

It reminds me of why I love collecting CDs. I absolutely do not need my collection of CDs; I don’t even have a CD player in my car, and I can listen to all the same things on my iPhone, but it’s the physicality and the fetish of it. It feels more human to put in a CD or read a physical book.

These acts of going out of our way to use physical items such as books and CDs instead of relying on the digital feels nostalgic, and almost like a coping mechanism for how quickly our world became so digital. Pressman words it the best by saying, “Bookishness signals a culture in transition but also provides a solution to a dilemma of the contemporary literary age: how to maintain a commitment to the nearness, attachment, and affiliation that the book traditionally represented now that the use value of the book has so radically altered.” This quote is so verdant and robust with great language, such as the words; transition and radically altered. It honestly blew my mind reading this. That bookishness, in a way, acts as a response to a culture in transition, and this is so because the changes to the book have been so radically altered. Less than twenty years ago, books were the only means to read stories and novels. The first Amazon Kindle didn’t come out until 2007. Computers didn’t become necessary for school and home life until the 90’s and early 2000s. This all proves how shocking and quick our transition from physical to digital truly was, and we’re all still in shock and attempting to adjust. Bookishness is also, in a way, a fight and push back against the digital, our response to the attempted deletion of our beloved physical items. In all, I resonate with the term bookishness, and I will continue to be bookish as a way to push back against a fully digital age.

Week 12: Fetishization of the Book and Self-Image

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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.