A lovely little bit on BBC1 the other night about the ongoing ‘human book’ programme run by libraries here and there in the UK. Lovely people doing it, lovely motivations behind it. In short, instead of going to a library and borrowing a book, you ‘borrow’ a person. They tell you something about themselves,and you can ask questions. Ideally, civil and enjoyable conversation is had, never something to be sniffed at in our ever-more aggressive world. As I said, lovely.
But while the folks on offer are certainly human, are they really books? I say no. A book, however it is delivered, is a work crafted by someone with a particular skill and intention; whether non-fiction or novel, it is a work of creativity, a work of art. You might counter that talking with someone can embody the same qualities that motivate literature, and certainly such a debate could go on into the night fueled by bottle upon bottle of one’s favourite tipple. But we’re talking about the differences both in process and product. The act of walking down the street contains movement, expression, motivation, intention and, in many cases, grace and beauty. But is it dance? After writing this, I will walk downstairs with my empty coffee mug, turn on the tap, wash it out, place it in a drying rack, towel off my hands, wander back upstairs, and probably return to my computer to complete some other things that need completing. Is that a performance? The cycle I described has a beginning, middle and end; it contains motivation, story (albeit a dull one), a performer, props, a setting….
You might argue that I’m making a proverbial mountain out of a proverbial molehill here; you might even be right. But in a world in which books are increasingly devalued–and in the UK, can’t we say the same of art in general?–it feels ok to be a bit reductive, perhaps even a bit pedantic in defending even the smallest, even the most innocent of further degradations to the idea of artistic process, intention and engagement. This is not about the form of the book: previous posts have laid out my position therein, which is that the medium is changing and in the process changing the message and how it is received and interpreted by audiences. That’s all fine. But if we can argue ’til dawn about when a book is a book, surely the lines must be clearer about when a book is NOT a book? Engaging someone in conversation, however valuable it might be, isn’t the same as engaging with a professionally crafted narrative. That’s chat, not literature. More than ever, it’s important to shout out the difference.
When its a map….
These images were taking during a project at Marriotts School in Stevenage
I had my facilitator hat on
and was encouraging Yr7staff and students
to see and use space differently
We armed students with masking tape and asked them to
create a map of their experiences at school.
This map covered the entire floor in the hall.
Over 150 students contributed to it.
This was a very simple idea but the results were fantastic, students worked in groups, negotiating and collaborating. Spatial awareness was crucial as was developing a visual language together.
Some of the images created had obvious explanations
and some…
were a little more opaque!
Either way, plenty of things to discuss
and consider.
And the speculative answer is…the 2012 London Olympics. We can’t take credit for the question, however. It was posed by A New Direction, which has commissioned Nimble Fish as one of 14 London arts and performance companies to co-devise and deliver a sweeping programme of work–as many as 150 schools will participate–that will aim to make the question and answer match up. For more info, see their press release issued today.
We all know there’s been a lot of yadda-yadda about the 2012 London Olympics: the hype, the price-tag, the questionable nationalist bravado. As for the arts and education, the great fear remains that they will be, at best, bolt-ons or box-ticks in the great, commercial scheme of it all. For all the bonhomie of the recent Vancouver games, let us not forget that one could not set foot in many venues without first dropping many hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
What we like about the way A New Direction is approaching its engagement with culture, schools and the Olympics is its honest recognition of these perceptions, as can be seen in this Demos paper the organisation commissioned not long ago. The paper charts the history of cultural and educational engagement in modern Olympics and finds it wanting, usually lacking substance, commitment or money (or often all of the above).
But we also like the fact that A New Direction is putting its money and energy where its ideals are and recognising that, like it or not, the 2012 London Olympics will be a transformative event that will echo in the consciousness of our young people for some time to come. We owe it to them to help engage meaningfully with this event, one of the truly global happenings in our so-called global village. Through this programme, A New Direction is mustering an impressive and broad array of the city’s cultural organisations to help make this happen.
So, getting back to the question in the post heading, we’re thrilled to be part of the broader team aiming to ensure that the 2012 London Olympics are indeed the answer (and we’re particularly happy to be in such good company). As the jocks might say, bring it on.
cross-posted from http://reauthoringproject.wordpress.com
Funny, the conversations you can find yourself sucked into while casually perusing a distant friend’s Facebook site. And so it was for me earlier this week, as I innocently replied to a posted article about the future of books; or more specifically, about the future of books as seen in these early days of Apple’s much-hyped iPad.
It was a thoughtful (if somewhat disjointed) article, the basic premise being that writers who start writing ‘for’ the iPad or Kindle or any other device as if it were merely a snazzier conveyer of a traditional form were doomed. The future winners of the Darwinian scrum now consuming the publishing world, the article concluded, were those who would think about how to tell their stories in a way that took maximum advantage of how new technologies engaged with their audiences. Making the story part-read, part-game, for example; or offering clues in the text that lead to embedded story enhancers on the web.
I’m all for such things as long as story remains paramount, which was the article’s primary point, and it was in this spirit I that offered a ‘huzzah’ on my friend’s FB page for bringing this tidbit to light. Alas, I was quite immediately flamed by another of her FB friends, who said essentially that he wondered what I was smoking. Surely, the flamer said, books were books and e-books or any other ‘e’ interpretation of text was something other than a book, and therefore not to be spoken of in the same hallowed tones as we must, so the flamer said, surely speak of ‘proper’ books.
As the flamer and I traded broadsides, a spot of Googling revealed him to be a rather accomplished and reasonably well-known author himself. The broadsides gradually morphed into a kind of detente as our (rather long) exchange moved to the diminishing opportunities for professional authors, and particularly authors who focus on non-fiction, which requires great expenditures of time, research, and travel, and therefore money (as in, literary advances) to produce. The flamer, whose work generally falls into this category, noted sadly that he’d seen his advances go from livable to laughable to non-existent: this despite prizes, press, and decent readership.
We concluded our exchange with a virtual handshake of sorts since I, too, know several writers with roughly the same literary profile and trajectory. I didn’t tell my nemesis-turned-(sort-of)-comrade-in-arms that some of these writers, rather than howling about a changing publishing world, had made conscious choices to do things differently. I didn’t say that some of them were beginning to reap dividends from doing so. I left that exchange wondering if I’d ever see the flamer’s name on a book again. I hope I do; he clearly does great work.
I feel fortunate to have retained a fair amount of flexibility in my thinking about writing and its changing forms and audiences. But it’s all too obvious that there are many writers out there who cannot see past ‘the book’, or even a very specific idea of what makes for a worthwhile book. Exhibit A: at one point, amidst an exchange about self-publishing, the flamer wrote that surely if one’s book doesn’t crack the Amazon top million, it isn’t worth much creatively. A dubious assertion indeed in a publishing world dominated by the likes of Dan Brown and JK Rowling.
The author of the article that started this whole saga, who proudly admitted to being only 21, said with great enthusiasm that if George Orwell had had an iPad and other tech gizmos to enhance his writing arsenal, he would “have blown our minds.” Maybe: would 1984 have been any more potent had Orwell decided, say, to embed a tiny webcam in the e-book version and have readers surreptitiously eavesdrop on each other? Discuss!
But at the least, one likes to think he’d have understood that just as sheepskin gave way to papyrus, and painstakingly-rendered monkish script gave way to Gutenberg, the form, function and use of ‘the book’ is changing again. But people still want stories, and they always will. Every writer should find solace and light in that idea.
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