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Dashboard/Reader folks: I’m trying out some new formatting business here, so my last post is a little funky formatting-wise. It probably makes more sense if you click through than if you view it in-dash or in-feed.

The dialogic book-fort.

I want the line between text and hypertext to blur. I want my books as portable as texts online and I want my online texts as faithful and tangible as paper and ink. I want to copy and paste paragraphs from paper — I want to look up words and cross-reference sentences. For that, even online texts still behave too much like paper.

*“I start every dance with a box…The box documents the active research on every project…The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil…Easily acquired. Inexpensive. Perfectly functional. Portable. Identifiable. Disposable. Eternal enough.”
–Twyla Tharp, from The Creative Habit

And at the same time, I want the process of physical texts. For the gathering stage, Twyla Tharp uses a box.* (In high school, it was the back of my bedroom door, a collage of quotes and images that were my research-file for constructing a self.) In graduate school it was the car-full of books I would pile around my living room floor as though I was building a fort of ambered* ideas to do my thinking in.

*“Each day I choose / from among the steepening reminders / of all I have failed to finish, failed to begin. / […] And these are only the books: / the thing already ambered, capable of waiting, turned to words.”
–Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt

How do you do this online? There’s a literal flatness to it — it’s too hard, still, to get that sense of generatively hoarding ideas.

I wonder, too, whether this lack of physicality isn’t the root of the current epidemic/hysteria about attribution and plagiarism; it’s so much easier to tell the difference between your own thoughts and others’ if they’re bound differently (or at all), if one is in your fingers and one is on the bookshelf.

The latest crop of startups and web apps keeps trying to get at this; aren’t Pinterest, Readmill, and Path all trying to replicate those workspaces we created in the chaos of research that was usually about who we wanted to be? Some of them get some of it right, but there are things that may be impossible to capture.

(A scrap of paper I’ve had with me since I was 13 or 14: a friend’s artist mother had a poetry-reading party. I felt like such a grown-up, bringing a poem or two I admired (I’m sure they rhymed). One of the women there read a poem with a line I loved and captured in the awkward cursive I wrote in then: “I go where nothing is waiting and find everything.” How would I bookmark that? How do I attribute it to that memory? How do I keep the raggedness of the way I tore it out and the shakiness of my handwriting and the text of the quote all together the way they are on the scrap of paper? How do I “pin” the reassurance it gave me to my nostalgia for the profundity I was sure it had?)

*“Of Bakhtin’s preternatural erudition there can be no doubt…Many times when we have consulted specialists in the various fields from which Bakhtin so easily draws his recherché examples, it was to be told that such and such a work did not exist…A few days later, however, after some more digging of thinking, the same specialist would call to say that indeed there was such a work, and, although little known even to most experts, it was the most precisely correct text for illustrating the point Bakhtin sought to make by invoking it.”
–page xvii of Michael Holquist’s introduction to The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin

But for all that, I’m so impatient with walled texts now. How can I do really connective critical thought without the hyperlink? How do you catalogue texts without search and tagging? Lacking a brain like Bakhtin,* I need to copy and paste, to share, to collect data instead of pages.

Can critical theory be done online?

Obviously, but how does it look? How do we know what it is? How is it fostered and presented? The LA Review of Books and The New Inquiry seem to be taking a valiant stab at it. From the LA Review of Books’ interview with Rachel Rosenfelt of The New Inquiry:

Do you think there’s a kind of criticism that is more suited to the internet than to print?

It depends on how you define criticism. To my mind, criticism at its core is merely the act of revealing links between objects. The long form essay was once the best (or only) way to reveal social or historical contextualization or demonstrate the relationship between two seemingly unrelated works of art, but new media has created new ways of doing this.

…which reminds me of this whole question. There is so much good and exciting about what TNI is doing. We need more like it, and we need a whole bunch of related things that help foster this kind of writing and thinking.

Not to mention that they’re taking baby steps toward a way to make this whole operation sustainable outside the academic model [which, btw, is clearly not super sustainable anyway]:

Basically, $2 a month is a pretty negligible price to pay for 130 pages of outstanding, illustrated, meticulously labored-over content. And if a lot of people subscribe to it even though they don’t really have to, we can keep making it.