It's been a while since I wrote Part One of this "review". Partly because I've had other things to do, but also because, if I'm honest, every time I picked up the first issue of Inscription and started to read I quickly grew frustrated with its size and floppiness, and the calculated "challenge" of the slow rotation of the page orientation around the central hole. Not to mention the tricksy tête-bêche construction of the volume, which makes it surprisingly difficult to return to whatever you were reading ten minutes ago. I understand that there are spiral and other underlying structural metaphors at work here, but it's not easy being even-handed towards something that seems wilfully designed to obstruct its own use, like a non-absorbent towel (if this seems an odd comparison to reach for, then fast forward to footnote four).
I should say up front that, for the right audience, the contents of Inscription are well worth reading, with the proviso that a high tolerance for the academic writing style is needed, and also for that of first-person essayist-rhapsodists such as Kathleen Jamie or Robert Macfarlane. Obviously, as with all work produced for the consumption of fellow specialists, there is a certain threshold beyond which the general reader will not want to proceed. No matter how much you love, say, cars, you will find little in the International Journal of Automotive Engineering that is of interest or even comprehensible. And, despite appearances, Inscription is not a volume for the general reader: it is an academic journal which has expanded to fill the production values of an expensively-produced artist's book or "little magazine". You can make up your own mind whether it's for you, as it's freely available on the Web.
There are aspects of material culture touched on in these pages that the intelligent general reader would certainly find interesting. For example, that pre-19th century papers are made from the rags of the cast-off clothing of the poor, that the preparation of vellum or parchment is a grisly and time-consuming business that begins with a dead sheep (or, in the very finest cases, an aborted calf), or that the lithographic stone that enabled the graphical freedom of the posters of Toulouse Lautrec is the very same Solnhofen limestone that yielded the original fossil of Archaeopteryx. And, yes, that manuscripts often differ significantly from the final, printed product in instructive ways. But these pieces are written by and for those for whom any of that is old news, and under an obligation, as in any peer-reviewed journal, to make something novel out of those old familiar rags.
I enjoyed Alexandra Franklin's account of learning the lore and craft of printing in a hands-on project of personally typesetting a copy of Moby-Dick (!), but then I come from a family of bookbinders and printers, and benefitted from the flamboyant lectures of the British Library's Nicolas Barker on historical book production when at UCL's postgraduate library school. I also appreciated John T. Hamilton's piece comparing Kafka's manuscripts with the final published work, which takes the form of a close reading (a sermon, almost) riffing on significant family resemblances between certain words used by Kafka, and their etymologies. Although, again, it happens to be the case that I have studied both German and Kafka: I'm sure other readers will pass over Hamilton's reflections on subtle shifts in the use of different passive voices in versions of The Trial as quickly as I did the utterly baffling notes of the "Roland Barthes Reading Group". I thought I had studied Barthes, too, but clearly not closely or recently enough: I have absolutely no idea what those hermetic annotations are all about, or who would benefit from reading them.
But the thing is, grappling with these often challenging pieces of content is not made any easier (in the print version) by continually being nudged in the ribs by their container, like one of those tiresome po-mo novels that insists, "Hey, this is just a novel! This is not real! I'm making this all up!" Well, no shit, Shakespeare. If my willing suspension of disbelief is not going to be appreciated around here, then I guess I'll just have to take it elsewhere.
It should go without saying that I am not some anti-intellectual despiser of academics. Had the job market for comparers of literature in the late 1970s been different, I'd probably have ended up doing homework for a living myself. But I also know only too well that the Oulipo Syndrome [1] has a fatal attraction for the academic mind, not least when that mind aspires to creativity. The lure of cleverness is a will-o'-the-wisp that can tempt the susceptible into the swamps of incomprehensibility and pretension. Example: a couple of weeks ago on BBC Radio 4 there was what sounded like it might be an interesting programme, "Trump: Backwards", in which archive footage would be played in reverse order, from the present day back to the beginnings of Trump's appearance on the American scene. Clever! The trailer included promising things like the voice of Alastair Cook describing the young Donald in one of his Letters from America. But I turned it off after 5 minutes. Why? Because the producer had decided to mash everything up into an infuriatingly jagged sound-collage of uncredited snatches of broadcast and music, shot through with the sort of "it's a fucked-up world" sound-effects that tell you what to think and feel even more insistently than an intrusive musical soundtrack. No doubt they had been encouraged to produce something really innovative. Instead, what resulted was something truly rebarbative: a train-wreck disaster of style over content.
Now, Inscription descends to nowhere near that level of misapplied ingenuity [2], but I do want to have a bit of a sustained moan about the format. Look, if you can imagine a very large paperback book, a slightly larger square than an LP sleeve, containing something like 130 pages printed on a heavy matte paper-stock that, in use, opens out into an unwieldy, sagging, two-foot by one-foot object which, in order to be read sequentially, has to be slowly rotated through 360° as you turn the pages, then you will understand how quickly one's mood can pass from amusement through bemusement to annoyance. I've complained about impractically large books before: see, for example, the 2010 post Oi, Nazraeli, No!!. I often wonder quite how much shelf-space, or what reading arrangements the designers of such books imagine are available in the typical household, or even at what distance they think reading glasses are optimised for, um, reading. Mine are set for somewhere between 12" and 18", so in the case of Inscription (which I'm reluctant to fold in half) it's rather like wrestling a fat newspaper that happens to weigh over 1½ pounds (800g). Worse, I also have the beginnings of arthritis in my neck, so do not appreciate being obliged to cock my head at an angle when reading for any length of time. I suppose it would help if you had a large, uncluttered, inclined surface, perhaps fitted out with a "lazy Susan" style turntable, two or more feet in diameter, ideally with ten-degree detents, a non-slip surface, and adjustable page-clamps. Or, failing that, perfect vision, exceptionally strong arms with excellent muscle stamina, and an awful lot of patience. But it does seem a lot to ask as the price of entry, doesn't it?
So, consider me successfully challenged. Obviously, one has to accept that this is, in large part, a physical embodiment of the whole point and purpose of the journal: to highlight and explore the materiality of inscribed culture. But how necessary or useful is it, really, for form to disrupt, to reflect, or to provoke reflections upon content? It can be effective, of course, and particularly if the content is both well-known and ripe for critique, and also has a strong, single personality – the Highway Code, say, or Scouting For Boys – but less so when the content is diverse and consists of dense academic prose or carefully tabulated texts spread over many pages.
Back in my student days, a book with the title The Book of the Book, by Idries Shah appeared. It was essentially a hardback book, equipped with all the usual publisher's bells and whistles – dustjacket, title-page, and so on – but was otherwise filled with 250 blank pages. Which you either thought was totally far out, or a complete rip-off. My friend Gerry bought a copy in Blackwell's Bookshop – we were fans of Idries Shah's Sufi tales of Mulla Nasrudin – and had to reassure the anxious sales-assistant that he would not be returning it due to its lack of content. As far as I understand it, that book was intended as a stimulus to spiritual awakening, a sort of bibliographic koan. [3] Other, similarly reflexive bibliographic or literary jeux d'esprit also tend to have designs upon our presumed complacency, as embodied by the boring old codex: wake up, sheeple! However, such would-be galvanising games, whatever their motivation, can only ever really be played once (or once in a generation, perhaps), and even then are best played in the sandbox of the imagination. How many blank, cut-up, randomly-shuffled, repurposed, redacted, or otherwise subverted texts – there has been no shortage of such "experiments" over the past century – have actually delivered a satisfying reading experience, enlightenment, raised consciousness, or pointed the way forward to a fruitful new direction for literature? [4] Very few, I'd say: Tom Phillips' Humument, of course, is one exception, but they're mostly famous dead-ends, like Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, or pure conceptual provocations, like John Latham's Still and Chew: Art and Culture 1966–1967. To the scholarly cast of mind, of course, there are no dead-ends, just under-explored and forgotten byways. Many of which, sadly, lead straight into the aforementioned swamps of incomprehensibility and pretension.
But, OK, that will do: end of sustained moan. Although...
No: I have said enough. I'm just indulging in some pet peeves at the expense of an excellent, well-produced, and thought-provoking endeavour, which I actually want to support and endorse (even if I do have a funny way of going about it). My prediction: it will survive and thrive, but online only. For all its bookishness, this is a project that wants to be a hyperlinked, multimedia website. Meanwhile, back in the material world, I haven't even taken the shrink-wrap off the vinyl record yet, or looked properly at any of the other generous printed enclosures. All of which puts me in mind of the fondly-remembered paraliterary phenomena of my childhood, things like the "free gifts" that occasionally came with a comic, generally yet another mask or "thunderclapper" (for the simple reason, I imagine, that they were flat and cheaply made out of printed card), but also the informative and beautifully-painted "cigarette" cards that came interleaved within the paper layers of a Brooke Bond tea-packet.
Suggestions for a future issue of Inscription, perhaps? I quite like the thought of the muffled crack of thunderclappers coming from behind academic office doors, or sundry profs trying out their scary Baudrillard masks for effect. Boo!
1. Oulipo = Ouvroir de littérature potentielle = the writing of literature with artificial constraints (such as a 300 page novel entirely lacking the letter "e") and described by the Oulipian Raymond Queneau as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape".
2. Although consider this: "The body text of this book [Inscription] is set in a collection of different versions of Garamond. There are 20 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas, 20 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbs and so on, which are sequentially ordered as the text is set. This sequence repeats every line." Ooookaay...
3. I was pleased to see that Inscription makes use of my favourite satori device as found in many instruction manuals: "This page intentionally left blank", which is repeated as "This page unintentionally left blank" at the other end/beginning of the volume. Heh... Did I mention that the whole thing is structured as a tête bêche publication?
4. Genuinely innovative and experimental design stands or falls by the extent to which it improves on the experience delivered by previous tried and tested formats, or offers a new, worthwhile experience. The Dyson Airblade hand-dryer (and its imitators) has taken over in most public toilets and washrooms for a simple reason: it's better. That is, better than those infuriating button press air dryers, which were better than a pull-operated towel dispenser, which was better than an actual towel with its ends sewn together on a roller, which was better than a towel hanging precariously on a hook (which was actually probably worse, not better, than nothing at all). The Airblade is quicker, more hygienic, more energy efficient, and completely unlikely to fall onto the floor. Of course, if the design brief had been to disrupt users' expectations of the hand-drying process – rather than dry their hands more quickly and more hygienically, with the added bonus of reducing cost and carbon footprint – then a towel made of non-absorbent cloth that consistently falls onto the floor into a puddle of piss might well do the trick.
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