Seattle: Calder's Eagle at Olympic Sculpture Park“After hours spent playing with my new iPod, I set it aside to read a book. While I thought the iPod was elegant, nothing beats the book. No downloading. No batteries. No cords. No ads. No links. No distractions. The format is so elegant that it becomes transparent. It is the perfect container for art.” (emphasis mine)
- Alec Soth, in a recent post “Toy Fatigue”
I bring this quote to light not because I dread iPods or downloading or batteries, but because of Soth’s beautifuul phrasing of what I consider an important part of my own aesthetic. Yes, hundreds of years of using books may have dulled many of us to their formal directness and simplicity, but he’s right – the format is perfect.
So were there other ideas on how books should exist that ultimately failed? Was there a “VHS vs. Beta” era of book formats? Or did it all just divinely fall into place, resulting a form unchanged for centuries?
not too long ago i was at the national arboretum, looking at papyrus growing, and thinking about the whole idea of using it as something to write on. it seems easier to imagine inventing the iPod rather than inventing the book.
today on pitchfork there is an interview with Tom Waits and he says this:
“I’m interested in things when I don’t know what they are. Like ‘Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?’ Oh, that’s lipstick from the 1700s, that’s dog food from the turn of the century, that’s a hat from World War II. I’m interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.”
good luck on the blog, dude.
I am ambivalant about the eventual supplanting of paper books by ebooks. there is just something about holding a clothbound hardcover in your hands. I wonder if people who grew up reading scrolls were equally ambivalant about the introduction of the codex. The codex format of smaller sheets bound in sequence can hardly be improved upon for convenience, but it does lack the flare of a scroll. And were tablet readers just as resistant to the scroll? You spend all that with your stylus time mastering cuneiform and then some young punk says “Hey, check out this ink and papyrus!”