From "Why Twitter’s New Interface Makes Us Mad/A change like the new Chirp font might seem subtle. The effects are anything but" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).
I hadn't noticed the change in Twitter, so I was inclined to make fun of the loftiness here, but then I thought of the place that really is deeply intertwined with my sense of myself, this blog. For many years, I've kept the same format for the page that you see, but the page where I write changed dramatically a while back, and I lost a feeling of fluidity and belonging. I'm a writer in exile from a place I remember and romanticize.
I wanted to read Walter Benjamin’s "Unpacking My Library," and, not finding the full text on line, I searched Amazon:
A colossal foot rasp! That will be good for my colossal foot:
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20 comments:
"But, when interfaces keep changing according to the profit incentives of vast technology corporations, it’s hard to feel that the things we publish and collect in our digital spaces really belong to us."
Add THAT; is Why they keep changing.
To Make Sure, that you realize, that Your life belongs to THEM, not you
I have found a pdf of the essay.
The essay should also be in the book Illuminations.
Now I too want to read the Walter Benjamin essay. Better yet I want the physical instance of it in my hand; a dusty tome perhaps, even a manuscript. I want to feel the weight and texture of it, and I want to place it on the shelf, one of the many now hopelessly crammed with other beloved objects of my attention (some even opened or skimmed briefly), here in the room I call my library, which my wife has declared a health hazard.
Seriously, though: our attachment to things is infinitely interesting. Every last one tells a story; is a prop and a prompt in the narrative always running in our minds. We own them; they own us, in a pair bond both personal and, to others, mysterious. And to those others, they mean something no less personal and mysterious.
Twitter has been treating me very strangely (I don't have an account). You now get this popup that you should join Twitter. Couple of days ago, it was every click you made you'd get the popup. And if you just closed it, you'd go back to wherever you clicked from - so you needed to go to the new url and hit enter so it would load from there, then close the popup so that you could finally read the tweet. Unbelievably annoying and stupid.
Last couple of days you get the popup less frequently, but when you do it's the same.
Hilarious. I've been looking for a foot rasp, and what better than a Colossal one! Poor Walter Benjamin. One lives a life and finds that in the end he is defined by a search of his name returns.
I once had cases and cases of books in boxes. I had collected most of them as a younger man as this was pre-Kindle and who didn't love Borders Bookstore when they were first around back then? Then I moved for a few years. And moved. And moved. But still I kept my books, envisioning the day when I'd finally settled down, and in my home had a room that was my Library. I saw it complete with large leather chairs, wood paneled bookshelves, and of course, brandy with snifters on the sideboard.
Except that after around my tenth move, I had had enough. I donated multiple cases of books to a local library to lighten my load. I realized that I might not ever 'settle down', that moving was going to keep on happening as long as I kept wanting to see new places. And then...I settled. And I finally unpacked my books. And yes- when you finally get them out of boxes and back up on a shelf, you see parts of your life. You remember what you were thinking back at a certain point. How a certain author caught you so much, or how you were brought down a different path of thinking- a life changing path brought on by a book.
Now I'm so settled it's unsettling. And because I gave away so many books I feel like I gave away a chunk of my life. It was a story of my life. The books that remain might seem like a lot to some, but it seems like nothing to me. And the ones that I gave away are, I'm sure, sitting in the dark, collecting dust, in a library that no one goes to any longer, in a part of a city that is not even safe to walk.
The Monty Python Foot: The television series' iconic giant foot was borrowed from this classical painting.
The painting is Bronzino’s Mannerist masterpiece An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, made in the 1500s for King Francis I. The piece hangs large alongside works by Michelangelo and Raphael, depicting with great detail and texture Cupid kissing his mother Venus.
Hundreds of years after Bronzino created his allegorical painting, a young animator working on a British television show wandered the museums of London looking for inspiration and imagery to use for his work. The animator was the gifted Terry Gilliam and the show was the epic comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
If you look carefully at the bottom lefthand corner of the painting, you may notice that Cupid’s foot is the emblematic Monty Python foot — you know, the giant foot that randomly stamps down from the heavens obliterating objects beneath it.
"A colossal foot rasp! That will be good for my colossal foot:"
Only if you have a colossal (Paul) Bunion : )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrisec7C7gQ
Temujin @ 7:45: "...gave away a chunk of my life." Word.
I think books have that effect (perhaps more than other relics from our past) because, as you say, some of them were life-altering; contained strings of inky shapes that represented ideas, thoughts behind the words; thoughts that were --to quote Seamus Heaney-- "mind-clearing." There is awe and excitement and terror involved in that. Hard to forget; hard to abandon the vessel that brought the thought into one's mind.
@Mary Beth
Yes, it's the first essay in that collection (which I put in my Kindle).
I figured there was a collection with the essay and that the essay title might not work in a search, but I was so entranced by the WAY it didn't work, that I deviated from my path toward reading the essay and followed the steps of the colossal foot.
"And the ones that I gave away are, I'm sure, sitting in the dark, collecting dust, in a library that no one goes to any longer, in a part of a city that is not even safe to walk"
The library threw them out because it has policy of no books published previous to 1976 like my public library. A second-hand book-store collected them. I was building up my paper library of select titles, none after 1976. I ordered a title from Amazon. "Amazon" was really this second hand store and the book I got was your book. Condition: Good, binding intact, some markings. $1.95. Sometimes I look at the underlines and wonder who did them.
Temujin at 7:45 AM
I once had cases and cases of books in boxes. I had collected most of them as a younger man ..... the ones that I gave away are, I'm sure, sitting in the dark, collecting dust, in a library that no one goes to any longer, in a part of a city that is not even safe to walk.
What a marvelous comment!
It's weird what Amazon will show you when it doesn't know what you want. I've considered purchasing one of the things on the list. Not the rasp.
“...we find our identities in the artifacts of the culture that we keep around us.”
I used to carry my Bible everywhere. Over time it became worn and beloved, with verses highlighted and notes in margins. I found my identity in its pages. Now I read the Bible through an app on phone or tablet. This offers advantages, like easy access to audio versions. But there are disadvantages too. I miss the tactile feel of a particular Bible in my hands, with memories of places it has gone with me. In many religions, a sacred book is an interface with the divine. In my case, I have changed the interface, with gains and losses in the change. This is an example of a larger issue of paper books vs ebooks, but it is an especially key thing for believers whose spirituality centers on a holy book that is a sacred interface with the divine.
I have moved several times in my life- I don't find it difficult to let things go each time. I have bought tons of books in the course of my life, but right now the only ones I still have are textbooks, and I don't have all of those- only those on math. I have gifted local libraries in CT, GA, and IL with hundreds of books over the years. Music is the same way- I have bought tons of records and CDs, but on each move I winnow a great deal of them out to the point were I have only retained my 30-40 most favorite, and I will probably let those go, too, on the next move which is coming up sometime in the next year or so.
I only visit a handful of blogs today that I visited in the early 2000s. Althouse, MarginalRevolution, Powerline, Volokh Conspiracy. For three of those, the interface is exactly the same throughout the blog's history.
This is exactly why old-timers like me are building our own physical media libraries.
I've already ripped my entire CD and DVD collection, and have it running on Plex in my garage on a 8TB drive. Any time I come across physical media, I immediately rip it and save all the files.
I also have a fairly large library of books going back to the 19th century.
What if Amazon decided that they didn't want "1984" to be available on Kindle any more, and they just yanked all digital copies of it? What COULD you do about it, other than a strongly worded letter to the editor?
The censors running the digital presses can't touch my physical copy of "1984" or anything else, and I think I'll keep it that way. They can't be trusted.
"As he goes through the very physical process, he recalls where the books came from and what they symbolize to him, knowledge either obtained or aspired to."
Benjamin was famously brilliant and original but indecisive, an academic and business failure, never living up to his promise, self-destructive and caught up in a peripatetic world of casinos, prostitution and drugs. There is a backstory to the bit about unpacking the books, told by his ex-wife Dora in a letter to Gershom Scholem, one of Benjamin's close friends:
Walter is in a very bad way ... He is entirely under Asja's influence [his lover from the demi-monde] and doing the things the pen resists writing ... He now exists only as a head and genitals, and ... in such cases the head is quickly overcome ... Walter has sued me for my debt, as the first divorce proceedings failed to resolve this question .... I gave him all the books, and the next day he also demanded the collection of children's books. In the winter he lived with me for months without paying ... After we gave each other every freedom for eight years ... he is suing me; now the German laws he despised are suddenly good enough for him.
(quoted at p. 28, in Wolfram Eilenberger, The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade the Reinvented Philosophy.)
Dora really knew how to turn a phrase.
Bookfinder usually has what you want:
Title is Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books
The Evolving Door Bookstore via Amazon.com United States
Hardcover, ISBN 9780300170924
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011
Hardcover. Edition: First Edition. 208 pages.
In Stock. Fulfillment by Amazon.
https://www.bookfinder.com
"No matter how often we use these platforms or how much we rely on them, we have no control over when they will change and what will be different."
Nailed that one.
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