The Book Shopper

Thumbnail Reviews: Two Book Oddities

I am always a sucker for  intrigued by books that are unconventional by either format or subject matter or some combination thereof:

Cloud, The 3 (2007) by Helen Mirra

Mirra is an artist who defies easy classification - visual artist, sculptor, poet, professor and Cloud, The 3 reflects this. In this book, Mirra has indexed John Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920)and reformatted it as a collection of short poems. Each page contains an index entry or two. Notice in the samples shown on the left (if you click on it to enlarge you will see it better) how they are alphabetical like an index and how their position shifts with each succeeding page. Clever.  I liked this book for several reasons: (a) It is fast reading, (b) I used to index for living (films not books) and (c) I appreciate short bursts of meaningful epigrams.  Here's just a few more examples:

 

Being everything, it was

    nothing, 66

 

Class interest and bias, 35

 

Default is inevitable

    and irremediable, 81

 

Squirm, dodge, evade,

    disguise, cover up, 

    find excuses, 104

Paper Knowledge: Toward A Media History of Documents (2014) by Lisa Gitelman

In this series of four scholarly thought pieces (but more thoughtful than academic) Professor of English and Media, Culture and Communication, Lisa Gitelman explores the significance of often overlooked paper documents. Gitelman focuses more on how the legacy of such documents as: death certificates, fill-in-the-blank forms and a 1936 printer's manual by Robert  C. Binkley entitled Manual on Methods to Reproduce Research Materials.

Though it is demanding to read, it's a pleasurable one too as Gitelman looks at how changes in technology and the business of printing has evolved in the last 150 years. She includes stories and anecdotes about ditto machines and mimeograph machines. (For those who went to school in their sixties can you recall the gluey warm smell of the fresh blue ink -- like Proust's madeleine?)  In another chapter she focuses on the history of the xerography. Who can forget the  early adoption of photocopying, which included xeroxing faces, hands and for the more adventurous -- buttocks. In the chapter she details the watershed moment for xerography, when Daniel Ellsburg removed classified Defense Department documents, copied them and then "published" The Pentagon Papers.

In a last full chapter, Gitelman offers a retrospective of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s and now has become ubiquitous. But what does this page-as-image really mean? For Gitelman, it reflects the culture of the modern office. In this passage Gitelman quotes from the Adobe's 1993 Acrobat manual, Beyond Paper: The Official Guide to Adobe Acrobat.

"Everyone has either launched their own memo grenade at one time or another or has sighted one lobbed over office partitions and across organizational charts." These are the memos sent up the chain of command -- to complain, criticize, or aggrandize the writer -- that fall flat, "explode" and embarrass him or her instead, with potentially career-damaging results. "And unfortunately, memo grenades will exist as long as there is office communication,"even if Adobe Acrobat exists to deliver them. Employees in this world don't as much bond together at the water cooler and the photocopy machine as they delight in deriding each others foibles and ambitions.

Postscript

For the record, I really resisted trying to scan the couple of pages from the Mirra book. Besides looking kind of horrible, it really doesn't do the book any justice. This book is an art object -- if you couldn't already tell from the word jumble front cover.  The Gitelman block quote in Paper Knowledge is from page 127.  The quotes within the block quote come from the Adobe manual. I wanted to scan this too, because I am a lazy typist, but two ugly scans in the same posting are verboten in the blog style manual.

 

 

A Humbling Tribute to Jim Harrison

When we die, we are only stories in the mind of others. - Jim Harrison, The Road Home

Unlike pop music stars such as David Bowie or country-western troubadours like Merle Haggard, when relatively well known writers die there is comparatively little fanfare. There are no award show musical salutes or moments of silence in sports arenas for writers who have recently passed. Usually it is just a few retrospective articles, a bump in sales on Amazon and that is about it. But I cannot let the recent death of the writer Jim Harrison at 78, go by unnoticed. When you have read at least ten books by the same author you cannot help feel somewhat connected to the guy. I never met him and I am not even sure if I had, I would have liked him, but that is one of the beauties of being a reader -- you can know a writer through his or her work and that is enough.

Jim Harrison Who?

At this point if you haven't heard of Jim Harrison, you've probably moved on, but in case you are still wondering who Harrison is,  allow me to quickly explain. He is the author of the book that the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall was based upon. You know, the movie starring Brad Pitt (I pause here to allow my female friends to sigh) and Aidan Quinn. It's the film about two brothers who are in love with the same woman, and a father (the gnarly Anthony Hopkins, shown at the right, who bears a physical resemblance to Harrison), who didn't teach the boys to share. I watched the movie again recently and I appreciated the Montana scenery of the Edward Zwick film, which won the Oscar for best cinematography, but Pitt as the uber-macho and tormented, woman-magnet is a little much at times.

Like Hemingway - Nah!

Harrison is often inaccurately compared to Ernest Hemingway.  They do look alike--except Harrison has a more untamed appearance--they both spent considerable time in Michigan, and they both utilize a simple sentence style with a confident, matter-of-fact tone, but Harrison's prose is deceptively rich. Another difference is that Hemingway is known for his "manly man" characters, whereas Harrison's men are equally tough but much better rounded. Yes, Harrison's middle-aged guys hunt, fish, and like dogs but they are not above pointing out their own foibles. Harrison males appreciate birds and animals (instead of always wanting to blast them) and like wine, food and strong women. (In 2001, Harrison has wrote a cookbook as well,  The Raw and the Cooked.)

I've read that some that consider Harrison a misogynist (or at least some of his characters), but he has developed several strong, memorable female characters along the way. One is the resourceful twenty-one-year old Julip Durham in the three novella compilation Julip. (1994), who has to get her mentally ill brother Bobby out of a Florida jail and into an institution. Then there is Dalva, the main character of the 1988 novel of the same name, who is complex and free-spirited. She loves the natural world, "the sound of horses eating oats," "floating naked in the Niobrara [River] current on a hot afternoon in August," and the "strange looks of animals making love." Nevertheless, she struggles in her relationships with men throughout her life. In the novel, Dalva goes in search of the son she gave up for adoption when she became pregnant at age fifteen. In an interview shortly before his death, Harrison said, "With Dalva I got to establish my own universe. At the time in my 30's, I largely misunderstood women and it was time to catch up."

Dalva is also one of the main characters in The Road Home (1998), a novel that covers three generations of a Nebraska family. This book unflinchingly tackles life's major conflicts: whom we love, how we decide to live, the role family history plays in our personalities and how we face death. It is some comfort to me that Harrison died with his writing boots on-- publishing a book and appearing in the New York Times Book Review the month of his death.