Enlightened Librarian: Readings

Enter the Iliad -- a wireless e-paper reader on the horizon · Dec 20, 06:42 PM

Since writing about the promise of electronic paper last spring, I’ve been waiting for a first-generation wireless e-paper reader to hit the market. Seems that will happen in April, although the “Iliad”—an e-reader with an eight-inch grayscale display and the capacity to download from the Internet—is being targeted for business-to-business applications, not yet to consumers.

The Dutch-based company iRex, a spinoff of electronics manufacturer Philips, announced the product today. It says the palm-sized device will include 224-MB of Flash memory, enough for over a month of newspapers and 30 books. In a one-page product description iRex describes the display as supporting 1024×768 pixels at 16 levels of gray and 160 dots per inch.

Underlying the device is the charged-particle technology of E-Ink, a Massachusets-based company that created a paper-like reading surface whose images and text can be rewritten, held in a static state with minimal power consumption and read in low light.

If the quality of the reading experience is sufficiently good, the market for a wireless e-paper reader could be significant. It would fill a gap between expensive and increasingly unportable laptops and versatile but ungainly PDAs, whose LCD screens have improved markedly in recent years, but which still do not lend themselves to extended periods of reading electronic text. Philips previously licensed its e-paper screen to Sony, which released its Librié reader in Japan; the device was praised for the clarity of its screen, but sharply criticized for its proprietary file format. iRex says the Iliad will accept a wide range of text formats, will include the ability to make annotations and will also play MP3s.

A number of manufacturers have announced that they are racing toward a marketable e-paper product in the next year or so. Some have questioned the longevity of a charged-particle display over a more conventional LCD that could also serve as a paper substitute, but iRex claims it has stabilized E-Ink’s technology.

In an interesting bit of related news, E-Ink’s primary competitor in charged-particle displays, the Xerox subsidiary Gyricon, announced last week that it will close at the end of December. Instead of focusing on e-readers, Gyricon had concentrated on the commercial signage market. The move will result in 50 layoffs.

See photos of the Iliad at iRex’s site

Read the closure announcement on Gyricon’s website

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Some words about type · Dec 6, 10:08 PM

This week’s New Yorker contains a fine article by Alec Wilkinson about the type designer Matthew Carter. Carter is behind some of the best fonts designed for the Web—Verdana, Georgia and Tahoma. As a teenaged apprentice at a Dutch printing house in the 1950s, he also was one of the last craftsmen to learn to cut steel punches for individual letters by hand. Type design is one of the most rigorous, constrained, and least forgiving of crafts, especially when the tiniest mis-stroke of a file could ruin several days’ work. Carter learned to think hard before he started, and such soul-testing labour taught him the enormous discernment he has for a product designed to be invisible.

That type should be servicable and undemonstrative was stated, nearly as a manifesto, by a critic named Beatrice Warde, in 1932…. In “Printing Should Be Invisible,” an address delivered to the British Typographers Guild and later collected in “The Crystal Goblet,” Warde said, “The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landsape which is the author’s words.” He might build a stained-glass window that is beautiful to look at, she says, but a failure as a window—that is, he might set a book in type so ornate that it becomes impenetrable. The reader’s mental eye, she said, should focus “through the type and not upon it.”

As Warde put it, the highest purpose of printed words is to allow the transfer of ideas from one mind to another. The type must do that through the idea of pure geometry—through a system of shapes and relationships, thick and thin strokes and white spaces through which meaning takes form and passes frictionless to the reader’s brain. But what begins as a geometric ideal ends in the myriad tweaks, nudges and negotiations needed to make a typeface pleasing to a human eye. That’s what makes type design one of the most exacting, but also humanistic of crafts.

Perfect geometry appears to form the basis for many typefaces [type designer Tobias] Frere-Jones says, “but in fact the eye will become confused if it sees pure geometry. The forms will seem stiff and labored.” Designing type involves a kind of stagecraft—“organized cheating,” Frere-Jones calls it—so that the eye will accept as symmetrical forms that are actually imperfect. “All sorts of fancy footwork goes into type design,” he says, “and if it’s done well you’ll never know that corrections were made.”

That’s called learning the rules so you can forget them and let the work dictate, a necessary process of any artist’s maturation. It’s also the task of creating the subtle rhythms and interplays of line and force that gives the best-designed type the shimmer of a living thing. It’s creating the illusion of a typographic wholeness, a gestalt, and convincing the mind to accept, and complete it, so apprehension of the vehicle disappears, leaving only the passenger and the flight.

Read the original essay by Beatrice Warde.

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Asine · Oct 10, 05:27 PM

Greece is a country that burns through the imagination. You might crave to walk on long-inhabited ground or step through a passageway where others have stepped for five millenia. Sooner or later, the immense accumulation of the past will burn through you and addle your mind.

Greece, which shows from the passing window of a bus not a strip mall but the battered stones of a 3,500-year-old citadel surrounded by a parking lot, is a country that says: get over it.

I had wanted to go back to a place that gets a four-word mention in the Iliad. Robert Fagles translates it as “Asine commanding the deep wide gulf.”¹ I had been there 17 years ago, at the impressionable age of 20, having begun to understand the life of books and to notice the freshness of the past that could be lifted whole from words. Like much of Greece, at bottom the ancient acropolis of Asine is a lump of gray rock—a rugged outcrop the size of a city block with a cave on one side next to a long beach, a tiny gravel cove on the other. It’s a modest place—just a jagged horn of rock in the Agean that had been occupied for 5,000 years. I had wanted—and I still want—a private piece of the bronze age. All I had to do was climb up and look.

As I found out later, the Greek poet George Seferis had been there in 1938, hungering for the same reward—to sink down through the lonliness of a solitary life and sense an earlier heartbeat. Seferis, however, tracks a much grander and more magnificent failure of the imagination when it tries to project itself to an earlier age that is present only in alienating fragments.

All morning long we looked around the citadel
starting from the shaded side, there where the sea,
green and without luster—breast of a slain peacock—
received us like time without an opening in it.
Veins of rock dropped down from high above,
twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive
at the water’s touch, while the eye following them
struggled to escape the tiresome rocking,
losing strength continually.

Seferis has nothing to do with dilettante tourism—he wants to know if he is strong enough to reanimate the place with only his own mind and art. The test is fraught with perils: he is surrounded by the “slain peacock” of overdescribed scenery and overabundant literary cliché. The poem’s opening atmosphere suggests that Seferis, in his 38th year, is well past the easy epiphanies of youth; he has already seen that the passage of time is heavy, seamless and closed, and its rhythm—the tiresome rocking—encourages you to stop trying so hard. Why not take it easy? Brilliantly, Seferis is a man standing in a place, seeing what he can. There is the theatricality of the light, the scouring erasure of the wind, and a third thing: the blind spot in every bright place.

On the sunny side a long empty beach
and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls.
No living thing, the wild doves gone
and the king of Asine, whom we’ve been trying to find for
two years now,
unknown , forgotten by all, even by Homer,
only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain,
thrown here like the gold burial mask.
You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light
like a dry jar in dug earth:
the same sound that our oars make in the sea.
The king of Asine a void under the mask
everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name:
“Αsίνην te… Αsίνην te…”
and his children statues
and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind
in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships
anchored in a vanished port:
under the mask a void.

Seferis visited Asine while it was being excavated by Swedish archeologists, and as they dig down through their grids of dirt, Seferis also lowers himself into the shadows. The country does not encourage this. Greece can seem a place devoid of privacy. Living takes place in the open, and a modern village is a reverberant echo chamber of concrete and whitewash holding the sounds of barking dogs, roosters, motorscooters, shouting arguments and cutlery falling back into the drawer. I live in a culture of institutionalized obsessions, especially of the retention of important life moments locked inside photographs. In Greece there is an easiness of the present and the past; either or both can exist in a moment’s conversation, and memories exist because they are passed from person to person. But there is also a hint of avoidance, a whiff of neurosis and taboo: stay still too long and you might remember too much and be dragged down. So far to fall! Better to twirl coloured beads and ward off the evil eye.

Seferis is doing the poet’s job—turning over rocks and watching the squirming truth underneath.

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls
carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence
a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish
in the dawn calm of the sea:
a void everywhere with us.

Sure, this is poet’s boilerplate: paraphrase most poems, and you’ll end up down this same dead-end road thinking about death. But the beauty of this poem is how it stays rooted to the act of looking at old stones. In this place the imagination does fail, releasing its grip; there is only abstraction, where memories themselves dissolve. Language can’t hold them: it is a hollow calcification that is outdone by an escaping phantom. What you will into being does not exist.

And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the
tenderness
of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with
the sea’s boundlessness
or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of a terrible willow-tree heaped in
permanent despair
while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes up-
rooted in the mud
image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness
has turned to stone:
the poet a void.

Seferis, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963, affirms that there is no escape from the rational course of dissection—fragments cannot be rebuilt, and dissolution is the end of both object and beholder. In that way, Plato was right: poets caught in the appearance of things will not escape the endless cycle of generation and decay to a more noble philosophical truth. Their’s is a wrong direction, and they are false guides. But Seferis winks and says Plato was too strict. Metaphors contain the idea of an impulse outside the forces of the will that can lead to a momentary flight from Plato’s cave. Seferis fully acknowledges the despair of temporal things falling apart, but he also suggests you can—if your excellence is sufficient—write a sentence the will create a glimmer of life. He does that at the end of the poem in a moment of alchemical brilliance.

Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring,
and from the depths of the cave a startled bat
hit the light as an arrow hits a shield:
“Αsίνην te…Αsίνην te…” Would that it were the king
of Asine
we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis
sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon
the stones.

The last line is meant to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end: Seferis conjures a ghost as present as his own hands.

The line holds the shiver that comes on a sweltering day standing on the rocks of ancient Asine.

Maybe it was the wind shifting.

Oh, and there are holiday snaps.

¹ Homer, trans. Robert Fagles. The Iliad. New York: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 117.

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Malcolm Gladwell reconsidered · Feb 28, 12:29 AM

Since accepting the grownup pleasure and duty that is a subscription to The New Yorker, I have become a keen follower of its most intellectually flamboyant journalist, Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is easy to admire. He has become justly famous for lateral thinking about everyday things—ketchup, messy desks, epidemics—using choice nuggets from the great dross of academic research to create startling arguments about the state of the world. We read Gladwell because his arguments are often breathtaking. He joins ideas from far right and left field on his balance beam of simple sentences, and dazzles us with his wry, make-it-look-easy style as he trips across the high wire.

For me, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is one of the more astonishing books of the last five years. Gladwell’s application of research on epidemics to social phenomena such as fashion and crime is beautifully cohesive, slick and persuasive. And since its appearance in 2000, the book has sunk into the culture with remarkable speed: we now have a language for qualifying the spread of fashions and the influence of charismatic people. The book’s success is even more remarkable because of its persistent word-of-mouth popularity. The Tipping Point has become a confirming test case of its own theories of how to set a social epidemic on its feet.

So why is Gladwell’s latest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, such a disappointment? Gladwell displays his customary insight and wit, this time in discussing the remarkable feats of rapid, unconscious decisionmaking of experts in areas such as art appraisal, couples therapy and law enforcement. But where in The Tipping Point he assembled a powerful manifesto that actually gets one thinking about how to put his theories into action, in Blink Gladwell settles on amusing, but ultimately directionless, storytelling. Gladwell aspires to be a popularizer of obscure theories that have the potential to change how people live, but his conclusion in Blink, that individuals can learn to read people and situations in split-second moments if they practice enough, is left entirely unexplored.

Near the end of Blink Gladwell mentions the cognitive grouping and patterning activities that are the heart of how a novice turns into an expert. (A police officer’s training to build the instincts to function in an emergency, for example, involves countless hours of practice and tedious repetition.) But Gladwell simply overlooks an entire literature of cognitive science that explores the techniques of how mental patterning occurs, which might have fulfilled his promise to have us live better lives by improving our mental filtration and concentration.

Then again, Blink might have turned out more instructive, but it may also have ground to a halt in a closer look at the extreme—and, to an outsider, mind-numbing—training at the heart of true expertise. As they stand, the book’s breezy, overlapping anecdotes are fun to read. Unfortunately at the centre of Blink is a lack of forthcomingness that Gladwell cannot entirely obscure with rhetorical dips and doodles.

Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, 2000.
—. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

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Report from the labyrinth · Jan 31, 03:38 PM

In Library: An Unquiet History Matthew Battles writes many beautiful sentences about the poetry and pathos of libraries, which are both echo chambers of society and too-frequent targets for eradication. As a cultural historian Battles proceeds boldly, and the book is a fine introduction to the major epochs of library and bibliographic development. From the book burnings of despots to the textual reverence of Judaism and Islam, Battles argues convincingly that how a society treats texts provides a clear window on how it tolerates ideas.

I fault his editor, though, for keeping the book short and sweet; it covers too much ground too quickly, yet also suffers from a meandering tendency—a charming characteristic of many bibliophiles, but dangerous in a short work (214 pages) in which pacing is key. (In recounting the intellectual wars of 18th Century England, for example, Battles’ overly long description of Jonathan Swift’s 1704 short story, “Battle of the Books,” throws the narrative off balance and tips it toward a cabinet of curiosities rather than an eclectic, but measured, history. I imagine the distended passage resulted from Battles’ editor saying that the book needed more action halfway through—as though purchasers of a history of libraries might need a jolt of excitement to keep reading to the end!) To his credit, Battles, a rare-books librarian at Harvard, recognizes the fallibility of tackling a history of a place that embodies all ideas. To undertake a history of the library as a cultural idea is to try to map a labyrinth:

From age to age, libraries grow and change, flourish and disappear, blossom and contract—and yet through them all we’re chasing after Alexandria, seeking a respite on Parnassus, haunted by the myths of knowledge and of wholeness that books spawn when massed in their millions. The divine irony that Borges discovered while groping his way through the stacks strikes the sighted librarian just as powerfully: preserving themselves, the books elude us. And yet it’s this that inspires more books, goading us to finish them, to complete the set, to add another book to the collection.

Matthew Battles. Library: An Unquiet History. New York: WW Norton, 2003.

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