LARB Digital Edition: Humanities

By Los Angeles Review of Books

It’s fall. Throughout the country, students are heading into classrooms where they will read and discuss books. There are ongoing questions about what use this reading will be to them. Indeed, will it be any use at all?

The essays in this month's Digital Edition are purposefully quite wide-ranging in their subjects and tone. Books, they show, are different things for English professors, for economists, for artists; they help us grieve, and they help us grow. The essays here share a sense that books quite often solve problems very different from the ones they explicitly address. So rather than using books to simplify and reduce a complex world, as the criticism book learning” might imply, these essays, together, advocate for a non-instrumental mode of reading. Read widely, they say, for a range of pleasures; read to enjoy the world, not to treat it as a problem to be solved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Sep 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660172

Book preview

Introduction

It’s fall.  Throughout the country, students are heading into classrooms where they will read and discuss books.  There are ongoing questions about what use this reading will be to them.  Indeed, will it be any use at all?

The phrase book learning is a criticism, and a useful one. We need it to talk about learning that puts theory fundamentally ahead of lived experience, or that separates books from bodies.  It’s worrisome when what we find in books divides us from the world around us, making us feel superior to what we set out to understand.

But a sense of superiority is not all we can glean from books. In fact, as the following essays and reviews show, books can be surprising points of connection to the world.  At strange and unexpected moments, books — sometimes as repositories of knowledge, sometimes as particular aesthetic experiences, sometimes simply as objects — can swoop in, helping the world snap into sharper focus. 

The following essays are purposefully quite wide ranging in their subjects and tone.  What they share is their sense that book learning might also, under some conditions, be a substantially more remarkable thing that the criticism suggests. Books, they show, are different things for English professors, for economists, for artists; they help us grieve, and they help us grow. 

The essays here share a sense that books quite often solve problems very different from the ones they explicitly address.  So rather than using books to simplify and reduce a complex world, as the criticism book learning might imply, these essays, together, advocate for a non-instrumental mode of reading.  Read widely, they say, for a range of pleasures; read to enjoy the world, not to treat it as a problem to be solved.

Sarah Mesle 

Senior Humanities Editor

Shelf Expression: Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books

By Jacquelyn Ardam

NINA KATCHADOURIAN LIKES LANGUAGE. While the Brooklyn-based artist has worked in many different media throughout her career — photography, sculpture, video, sound, even spider-web — Katchadourian’s deep interest in the linguistic is evident across her work. Whether she’s translating popcorn kernel pops into Morse code (Talking Popcorn), or editing the words out of the Apollo 11 moonwalk recordings (Indecision on the Moon), the relationship between language and the material forms it takes is at stake in much of her work.

Nowhere is this more true than in Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project, which plays with found language in the form of book titles. There’s something deeply satisfying about the language of Sorted Books. The pieces are precise and economical, and they offer up a kind of verbal instant gratification. They deliver a flash of recognition, the almost visceral pleasure of something being exactly on the nose.

While many have been quick to categorize Sorted Books as a kind of poetry, Katchadourian’s pieces are rarely taken seriously as poems or read in a poetic tradition. Katchadourian is known primarily as a visual artist, and she has been working on Sorted Books since she was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego in 1993. The project has taken many shapes in its 20-year existence, and in March it was published for the first time in book form. Viewing the pieces of Sorted Books all together in a book offers up an occasion for us to see Katchadourian’s work differently, to rethink the boundaries between visual arts and literature, and to read her images as we would read poems.

But can we eschew the visual when we read? What is the relationship between a poem’s content and its appearance on the page? These questions have a long history in literary criticism, and Katchadourian’s work makes them newly provocative. The art critic Brian Dillon, in his introduction to Sorted Books, describes the project’s many iterations:

Sorted Books is many things at the same time: a series of sculptures, or photographs, or site-specific installations: a collection of short stories, or poems, or jokes, a work in which the found object is subject alike to chance and the most painstaking choices: a delicate conceptual game with the horizontal and the vertical. But it is first of all an act of reading.

Dillon elevates reading as the method of taking in Katchadourian’s project, and his approach to Sorted Books has been echoed by the public’s reception of the project over the years. Katchadourian’s work has inspired many, many copycats, who latch onto reading as the mode of taking in — and thus emulating — the project. Often under the banner of "spine poetry," these imitators have attempted to create their own versions of Sorted Books. As even a quick glance at the spine poetry website proves, Katchadourian’s imitators pay little attention to the aesthetics of the books themselves. It’s clear from their pieces that their mode of reading elevates semantics — making meaning out of the juxtapositions of titles — above and beyond the material aspects of the books; their color, size, shape, and texture take a backseat. Most of the imitators’ work pales in comparison to Katchadourian’s, and it’s when we compare the clusters of Sorted Books to the copycat clusters that her skill becomes most apparent. Sorted Books is deceptive in its simplicity, and Katchadourian’s economical and idiosyncratic use of found language, as well as her distinctive aesthetic for the project, become even more visible when compared to less evocative examples of spine poetry.

Katchadourian encourages the copycat phenomenon; she has judged a number of library contests in which people create their own book clusters, and she seems to genuinely enjoy the life that her project has taken on in the hands of others. But, she explains in an email interview, reading has a broader meaning to Katchadourian than it does to her imitators:

Sorted Books is much more than reading the words on the spines of the books. It's also about reading, in the interpretive sense, the implications of the typefaces in relationship to one another, the color and weight and size of the books, the rhythm of the language in play, etc. — all of these things are also part of what the book clusters mean and how they communicate, and all that gets read by viewer at the same time as they are reading the words on the books themselves [. . .] the part of the project that is most overlooked, and most underestimated when the project is in the hands of others, is the importance of treating the books as sculptural objects with physical properties.

Reading, for Katchadourian, is more than a digestion of language: it’s also an apprehension of the materiality of the book, a simultaneous encounter with language’s physical and semantic realities. Nonetheless, the term spine poetry (never used by Katchadourian herself) is suggestive. Not only are the pieces of Sorted Books quite literally made out of books, their language, like the language of poetry, is lineated, rhythmic, precise, and painstakingly arranged. And it is in these ways that Katchadourian’s work aligns with a poetic tradition particularly focused on the relationship between word and image.

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In the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, Ezra Pound famously described the ideal Imagist poem. The Imagist movement, coming on the heels of ornate decadent and Edwardian verse, valorized a very specific kind of poetry: short, precise, economical. Pound proposed three (now infamous) rules for the would-be Imagist:

1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the sequence of a metronome.

To see how this works in practice, consider the most oft-cited Imagist poem, Pound’s In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Here, Pound aligns two phrases and asks us to consider their relationship, suggesting that there is some level of equivalency between the apparition of these faces and the petals on a bough: between the ghostly modern subject in the metro station and dewy petals on a wet branch. Pound does not explain the relationship between the two sides of the sort-of equation; he presents only the juxtaposition. In his book Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), he declares that the ‘one image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. Pound took the Chinese ideogram as his model of super-position, and while Pound’s misreadings of Chinese have been well-catalogued, his idea of super-position was potent; the stacking of disparate phrases — one idea set on top of another’’ — was a touchstone of the Imagist movement. When we read an Imagist poem, we must expand on connections that the poet only suggests through this heightened form of juxtaposition. Even Pound himself struggled with the relationship between the lines of In a Station of the Metro;" one earlier published version of the poem had no punctuation at the end of the first line, while another featured a colon, rather than a semi-colon. The relationship between the lines is the question of the poem, for Pound, as well as for his readers.

Though the Imagist movement itself lasted just a few years, Pound’s emphasis on directness, economy, and an attention to the natural rhythms of language have resounded throughout the 20th century. Variations of it crop up in work by poets as diverse as H.D., William Carlos Williams, Jean