Stephen Mitchelmore, in a recent post at This Plaice Space, writes of his “uncomprehending recognition of the regular flounder between Blanchot and Bernhard, Proust and Kafka, Stevens and Celan from which this blog is suspended.“I thought that a nice phrase - we all have our tutelary deities, beneath whom we variously, to quote Webster’s definition of “flounder”, fling the limbs and body, as in making efforts to move; … struggle, as a horse in the mire, or as a fish on land; …roll, toss, and tumble; … flounce. I seem to myself to make steady dabs between Perec and Celan, Ashbery and Pessoa, Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, and many others…

In the meanwhile, here’s a rather angry-looking flounder, by Günter Grass:

Gunter Grass, ‘Butt uber Land’ (’Flounder above country’) 1978, etching

from the exhibition “The Writer’s Brush”

At first glance, writers of languages like English seem to be those who favor an arrow of time which goes left to right and down the page. Page breaks are some sort of discontinuity which doesn’t seem to bother them, but seems to bother a related clan, the copy editor. But a closer inspection of the writer clan shows that their arrow of time is at best a confusing mishmash of directions. For example, an often employed trick is the so-called “flashback” in which the reader is magically transported back in time to an event which the writer couldn’t figure out how to include otherwise or was too lazy to figure out how to include without using this trick of the trade. Another common technique is the mental head fake on the arrow of time known as “foreshadowing.” So while the rhythm of reading may go left to right and down the page, this direction in time is often a farce, disguising a deep disregard for any pure direction of time, but allowing all sorts of internal analepsis, external analepsis, and prolepsis.

Conclusion: the arrow appears to be left to right and down, but in postmodern interpretation is to be regarded none of anyone’s business.

from The Quantum Pontiff: Occupational Arrows ofTime, via Fed by Birds

A story of cultural differences, and the power of the written word.
via super colossal

New York attorney and bibliophile Donald Oresman and his wife, Patricia, began in 1974 to focus their art collection upon images of people reading. That year, they saw Jim Dine’s portrait of his wife, Nancy, reading and bought it. A few weeks later they came across Larry Rivers’ portrait of the poet Frank O’Hara reading. “Something clicked,“ Oresman would write. “Readers became the focus from then on.”

People Reading: Selections from the Collection of Donald and Patricia Oresman

via Wessel & Lieberman, via del.icio.us/sarahhollenbeck

The Book of Accidents: Designed for Young Children. New Haven : S. Babcock, Sidney’s press, 1831.

via Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities

The Triumph of Bullshit

One of the diseases of this age is the multiplicity of books; they doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought forth into the world.

- Barnaby Rich, 1613

some fellside agitprop?

[I was looking for this photo last night, and couldn't find it:

Sheep on the Move, by lundulph]

… with the idea of proto-constructivist agit-prop on the fells, stray Herdwicks limning quasi-Malevichs, near-Mondrians, organised by eager sheepdog commissars. Kurt Schwitters perhaps nearby, appreciating this rural echo of the vanished hopes of Weimar modernism.

Smit Marks: “The smit mark is a bold stroke or pop, spot, or other coloured mark on the sheep’s body, that can be seen clearly from a distance.” - from a page about Shepherds’ Guides from a very interesting general site about the history of the Lake District.

See also Barry McKay’s lecture delivered at the Hidden TypographyConference, St Bride Printing Library, 20 October 2003.

Posed by Luc Sante, in an interesting post about an educational pocket library series published by the early 20th century American Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason:

What happened to continuing self-education? These books were read by teamsters and machinists and stevedores and farmhands and miners. They read them not because they thought the books could help them get a better job but because they were curious. They were hungry–they wanted to consume the world. This isn’t to say that every hod-carrier in Michigan in 1910 was reading them, but enough were to make the series continually expand. And none of it was fluff, or merely mercenary, or simple-minded propaganda. How many people–with considerably longer formal educations and a larger fund of leisure time–read anything like that sort of thing today, for fun? How many people assume without thinking about it that reading is and has always been a pursuit strictly for the privileged? Would it be too much to consider a connection between the rightward shift in politics and the decline of self-motivated learning?

…. just very good indeed. Isaac Tobin’s jacket designs, mainly for the University of Chicago Press.

Pointer from The Book Design Review, a while back.

Image: jacket for Chad Heap’s Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.

Interestingly, this seems not to be the final jacket - this is the book’s page at the University of Chicago Press - but I think this one’s better, implying as it does that this sort of thing was going on just a bit earlier than one might have thought…