via Between Page and Screen

As e-readers continue to gain market share within the publishing industry and the “future of the book” remains a much bandied about phrase among publishers, writers, agents, booksellers and readers, “Between Page and Screen” has embraced the what-ifs and used them to achieve their true potential, an astoundingly realized book that shuns either/or designations. It champions both the book’s esteemed history by valuing ink printed on the page and also celebrates the potential of digital technologies that are resulting in all of us, no matter our preferences, having to change how we read.

via Between Page and Screen

“Between Page and Screen” is an entirely new reading experience, and no matter if you favor codex books or e-readers, reading this book makes you acutely aware of the act of reading it. Properly situating the book in front of your computer’s webcam takes a bit of practice but once you get the hang of it the pun-rich missives between P and S are unleashed. Certain entries initially show up on the screen as if you are reading them in a mirror, and it takes some maneuvering to arrive at that aha moment when you realize you just need to turn the page around to invert the text. Soon enough, the reading experience pulls you in like any other. Word-play animations splice up the word “hear” into “he” and “ear.” The letters between P and S speak to the project’s larger themes, making assertions like “page don’t cage me in” and “a screen is a shield, but also a veil,” asking questions like “What are boundaries anyway?”

Clearly, for the authors, boundaries are little more than challenges, which they have met head on, daunted not in the least, creating a reading experience unlike any other. Innovators like Borsuk and Bouse prove that the future of the book should be something we all consider with optimism provided we think beyond current expectations and strive to build new ones.

The authors were kind enough to answer the following questions via email.

via Siglio Press

How did the project take shape? Did the two of you set out to make the book as it exists or did it grow out of various other projects and interests?

We did set out to make the book as it exists. The content and the construction arose together out of our conversations about augmented reality (AR) and the way it puts text between the page and screen. In thinking about the relationship this sets up between print and digital objects, we got the idea for an artist’s book that explores that between space. We had been talking about collaborating on a project for some time, but we didn’t want the digital aspect, which is Brad’s specialty, to seem simply “added on” to the poems, which are Amaranth’s specialty. We wanted there to be a reason to use new media, and AR provided us the perfect marriage of print and digital that wouldn’t privilege one over the other, and that would highlight the importance of the reader in activating any book’s text.

What do you mean in saying that augmented reality “puts text between the page and screen”?

We mean that the text is not available on one or the other platform, but in the between space opened up by the reader who has access to both. On its own, the book provides only minimalist grid shapes and the screen provides only the reader/viewer’s image. But when the two are paired, the text appears – and it’s at that very juncture where the reader’s image and the book object meet that the words arise.

Had you already written the exchanges between P and S?

Once we had the idea for an exploration of the relationship between page and screen, the “relationship” began to take shape in relation to a number of literary forebears that use the conceit of letters, from Ovid to “Griffin and Sabine.” Amaranth then started to write the letters P and S trade back and forth.

Is this project a natural evolution in your background as a poet and book artist, Amaranth, or is it a result of feeling unfulfilled by traditional codex books as they exist in today’s screen-based culture?

I see it as a natural evolution. I’m not dissatisfied with codex books at all – I think there are certain things they do incredibly well, and other things that e-books and electronic literature works do well. I am, however, interested in our changing relationship with book objects and the way the shape of the book is changing in response to the proliferation of screen-based reading devices. For me, the most important thing is that the book has some reason for the form it takes. “Between Page and Screen” simply wouldn’t be the same book if the poems were printed on the page or at a website. It needs the “between” in order to make sense. I don’t think all books need to go that route, and I’m ready to turn to whichever apparatus best helps me tell the story I want to tell or explore the themes I want to explore.

via Between Page and Screen

More and more I’m convinced that the essence of a story is indifferent to technological developments. What changes is how the story is told or delivered, enhanced or altered by cultural shifts, from how the oral tradition faded away with scrolls and the printing press, etc. What would you say to that?

If you mean that the hallmarks of engaging writing remain largely unchanged despite technological shifts, I would say there’s some truth in that. But I do believe that the experience of reading a story changes with the medium through which we receive it. “Between Page and Screen” wouldn’t be or do exactly the same thing if the poems were printed in a book. Primacy would be given to the page.

I do think that where poetry is concerned technological shifts can have a dramatic effect on the shape and content of the work (the impact of the typewriter on the “look” of 20th-century poetry is well-established, for example). And ideological shifts in what writers want to do with poetry influence its shape as well. I don’t know that there’s a single “essence” of poetry that remains unchanged over time, unless we talk about it as an engagement with language. But there are so many different kinds of poetry that it becomes difficult to generalize, I think.

In setting out to create “Between Page and Screen” were you aware of early experiments in electronic/digital books and their presentation, like Robert Coover’s Cave and Bob Stein’s Institute for the Future of the Book?

Very much so! Amaranth is a member of the Electronic Literature Organization, and has been studying new media writing since she was in graduate school at USC (coincidentally, that’s where she learned of Stein’s work with if:Book). Her dissertation on poets’ use of writing technologies that allow for a distributed idea of authorship spanned from modernism to contemporary digital poetry, and she has studied and written on interactive text works from early hypertexts, to Flash animations, to crowd-sourced poems.

Amaranth, in your dissertation what sorts of “writing technologies” are you referring to in terms of modernist poets? I’m imagining Pound in his cage in Italy, watching birds and scrawling Chinese characters in the dirt with eucalyptus nibs. Is that what you mean, or is it more about carbon copies and linotype?

My dissertation primarily concerned Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars’s use of the typewriter (he had lost a hand in the First World War and it facilitated his writing greatly, but also served as a kind of muse and musical instrument) and American poet H.D.’s use of projective mediumship (the figure of the medium who can project images out of her body and into the room around her recurs in her WWII writings). I connect these poets to contemporary writers for whom technology offers access to a world of language outside the poet and a kind of collaborator in putting words on the page (both writers suggest that the words are being channeled through them thanks to the machine). Pound was highly skeptical of what H.D. was doing in the war years, especially her spiritualism.

via Siglio Press

What books, films and/or artworks do you count among your favorite in terms of helping to inspire “Between Page and Screen?”

Dieter Roth’s artist’s books, particularly his die-cut books, were definitely an influence on the shape of the book and the cover. The poems were heavily influenced by concrete poetry, particularly the work of Emmett Williams (whose “Sweethearts” is one of Amaranth’s favorite books), Mary Ellen Solt and Decio Pignatari, among others. In the electronic literature world, Camille Utterback’s “Text Rain” is also an inspiration. The epistles themselves are influenced by and draw heavily upon the “American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Word Roots.” I’m sure there are more that we’re forgetting!

Would you expand a bit on how the Indo-European word roots play into the letters?

The letters are full of puns, homophones and word play using words that share the Indo-European roots of “page” and “screen.”

Page comes from the roots pag- and pak-, which means to fasten or join together. It gives us words about connection, like “pact,” “peace,” “appease,” “pacify,” “pawl,” “pole” and “peasant.” The Latin root of page, pagina, means trellis (so at its heart, the page is metaphorically a trellis to which lines of writing are affixed).

Screen’s root (s)ker-, means to shine, and it develops from a form that means to cut (the metonymic connection is that many cutting implements have a sheen). That root gives us words about protection and defense like “scabbard,” “shield,” “skirmish,” “shear,” “score,” “carnage,” “carrion” and even “charcuterie” (from the Latin root caro, for flesh).

While the two different roots, one peaceful, the other militaristic conjure up two different personalities, there are points of connection between them “Screen” gives us a few connecting words, too: “share” and the other “sheer,” as in translucent, also “incarnate.” Peace loving “page” gives us the violent “fang,” “impale” and “impact.”

The poems play with those etymologies, giving the two bits of banter about their romantic compatibility.

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Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).

As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.

If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.

In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare) is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum). If you’ve ever turned on the option that lets you see other readers’ highlights in a Kindle book, you’ll find that they almost always underline similar mottos, such as this line from Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.”

The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?

Others (including, recently, the novelist Philip Roth) reject fiction entirely and turn to history or narrative nonfiction, explaining that, at the very least, they can be sure they’re “learning something” from what they read. Learning can certainly be fun, but the implication is that acquiring facts about, say, the life of Cleopatra, has more value than following the story of an imaginary person like Elizabeth Bennet. The Precious Time thus passed away has something to show for itself, and the American mania for self-improvement has been appeased. Never mind that most of us will find little practical use for information on quantum mechanics, the military stratagems of World War II or the private lives of British aristocrats.

Ultimately, all of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success (two classic Puritan preoccupations). For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit. Like any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Further reading

Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols on their twins’ third-grade reading test for the New York Times SchoolBook blog

Philip Roth says he’s stopped reading fiction

Laura also asked readers to weigh in on their least favorite books from their school days, and you were quick to volunteer (there are nearly 200 comments on the article so far).

So, which books won’t we be finding on your grown-up bookshelves, with 8th-grade annotations and yellowed endpapers lovingly preserved?

Well, for one thing, some of you really, really don’t like “Ethan Frome.” In your eyes, it’s not just “tedious.” It’s also “bleak,” “depressing” and “insufferable” enough to “[crush] your soul.” And if anything, “Silas Marner” is even more unpopular; one commenter quipped that it ought to be “hurled into the Mariana Trench.”

Other volumes less than dear to (some of) your hearts include “Moby-Dick,” Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Jane Eyre,” “Invisible Man,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Paradise Lost,” “Heart of Darkness,” “Little Women,” “Gone with the Wind,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Crime and Punishment” (“It took 10 years and a degree in computer science before I’d exorcised my demons and picked up anything deeper than a Robert Ludlum novel,” one of you wrote) and “Great Expectations.” And suffice it to say that, were he still alive, John Steinbeck would be unlikely to find himself in your collective debt.

Why did you find these books so annoying? Complaints about length (“‘Crime and Punishment’ might possibly have made for a great 12-page short story”), inscrutable vocabulary (“Brave New World”) and age-inappropriate plot points were numerous. But many also made the argument that it wasn’t always a book itself (however challenging) that was the problem; in many cases, it was the quality — or lack — of accompanying instruction.

Where strength of teaching was concerned, a lot seemed to come down to a teacher’s efforts to provide historical context. Is it useful to assign “Animal Farm” to students who have yet to deal with the relevant Soviet backstory? Why try “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” if you’re not going to give it the explanation it deserves? (Wrote one reader, “Thomas Hardy may have meant ["Tess"] to be a story about 19th-century double standards, but since it is impossible to have a discussion about female sexuality in a high school English class that would put the book in context for the student readers, it came off as an unpalatable cross between a bodice ripper and a cautionary tale. Until our society evolves to the point where the instructors can teach the book properly, I wish they’d stop teaching it at all!”) Just “study some history,” one commenter concluded, “and Melville, Dickens and Steinbeck come alive.”

Of course, the Bard had a corner of the debate all to himself. “Shakespeare should be read aloud,” or seen in performance, instead of — or at least in addition to — being read in print: this was a common refrain. “Why, why, why do educators insist on using ‘Romeo and Juliet’ as the introductory play?” one reader asked plaintively. “I think they’d have better luck with one of the comedies” — perhaps “The Comedy of Errors.” And though some bemoaned the difficulty of Shakespeare’s English, suggesting it might not be worthwhile for classes to slave over outdated Elizabethan jibes, at least one of you wouldn’t stand for that line of thinking, hitting back: “If you don’t appreciate Shakespeare, then you are dull, tone-deaf, rhythmically challenged and know nothing about the English language or human life.”

Rather unsurprisingly, no one stepped up to defend the required reading of “Finnegans Wake,” which one of you was inexplicably forced to endure as a student. Perhaps jared2 will take comfort in the words of a contemporary reviewer of the tome, who wrote: “The work is not written in English, or in any other language, as language is commonly known. … [James Joyce] alone could explain his book and, I suppose, he alone review it.”

Lastly, some of those who weighed in were not only former English students, but also current English teachers; their points added a stimulating dose of the practical. Morning’s Minion noted that any tale disturbing enough to merit inclusion in a reader’s list of ban-able books had clearly “registered on a pretty profound level” — and argued that books whose rewards are not immediately apparent should not necessarily be written off:

I have long been of the opinion that the only real crime in teaching is diluting the curriculum and lowering expectations for what students can achieve. I’ve written about this before on teaching threads, but when you set the bar high, students reach for it; not all touch it, but their hands are high, and energy, effort, and passion go into the endeavor. When you set it low, they know it, trip over it, and resent you like hell for underestimating them.

Another teacher, Lisa Rathert, added:

My rule of thumb is to choose literature that I love and am excited about when I can, and attempt to teach required texts thematically, or in context. My personal preference would be to develop blended courses that combine literature, history, government, and philosophy. “The Scarlet Letter” becomes much more interesting when students examine it in the context of America’s original and ongoing “culture wars;” “Lord of the Flies” could be very revealing when compared to rosier versions of childhood “innocence,” or discussed in the context of competing theories of human nature.

Besides, no matter what we choose to teach in English class, someone’s going to complain. So, if all else fails, teach the controversy. No matter what their reading [comprehension] scores, I’ve never met a student who didn’t have strong opinions, and who didn’t appreciate having a chance to express them.

Can a task this ineffable be automated? Many seem to think so. For years, Amazon and other e-booksellers have offered their customers suggestions based on the purchases of other customers who bought the same books. But you don’t necessarily read every book you buy from an online retailer (some are gifts) and you probably don’t like every book you read, either. For that matter, the books you like best you may have bought elsewhere, or borrowed from a friend.

The latest and most ambitious attempt to automate book recommendations is the website BookLamp.org, launched last week. It’s the public point of interaction with something called the Book Genome Project, an effort to “identify, track, measure, and study the multitude of features that make up a book using computational tools.” BookLamp’s oft-cited model is Pandora.com, a music-discovery service that allows users to create and listen to playlists based on a single song, artist or genre. Founder Aaron Stanton also cites OKTrends, a blog that crunches and analyzes data extracted from the OKCupid dating website, as an inspiration.

Stanton and company (students at the University of Idaho when the project began in 2003 and  academics from several institutions still figure among their researchers and programmers) have fed the text of some 10,000 books into a custom-built software program. The program then identified certain recurring elements and clusters of elements. The designers in turn trained it to recognize those elements and determine how much of each one can be found in a given book.

If this sounds confusing, it is, a bit. On the phone, Stanton explained to me that he and his confederates feel that more traditional labels applied to books — the genre classifications imposed by publishers and the categories of the Library of Congress’ cataloging system — are inadequate. BookLamp can not only provide a precise accounting of such literary qualities as “dialog,” “density,” “description” and “motion,” it can also measure how much of the book involves “Sea Voyages” or “Pregnancy/ Motherhood/ Infant Care” or, for that matter, “Rocky & Dry Terrain/ Canyons.” These metrics are included with 132 other “thematic ingredients” under a broad category the project’s designers call “StoryDNA.”

Such elements “aren’t necessarily what the book’s about, but they’re present,” Stanton told me. He added that although he would never say that Stephen King’s “The Stand” is about “Vehicles/ Rural Travel/ Country Roads,” nevertheless “you couldn’t tell the story of ‘The Stand’ without referring to those things.”

How prevalent such elements are influences a reader’s experience. “A book with 10 percent vampires is a very different book than a book with 80 percent vampires,” Stanton observed. BookLamp searches its database for titles with similar levels. (The idea that a book could be 10 percent or 80 percent vampires was difficult to wrap my mind around until I recalled the way a friend would complain whenever an episode of “Buffy the Vampire” suffered from “not enough vampires.”)

To use a familiar book as an example, Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes up in the BookLamp database with high quantities of “Newspaper Reporting/ Journalism” and “Criminal Investigation/ Detective Work.” Very true. But why does it also show significant levels of “Extended Family/ Cousins & Relatives” and the rather cryptic metric “Scheduling/ Elements of Time”?

“We make no claims to rightness,” Stanton said, explaining that BookLamp is very much a work in progress and that one of the project’s first priorities is to build a much larger database of analyzed books. (This will require the assistance of publishers.) “There are times when the system comes back with something I’d never thought it was capable of” — such as identifying the works of Stephen King as being very similar to the works of Richard Bachman, a King pseudonym — “and then there are times when I’m looking at it and thinking this suggestion doesn’t make much sense.”

Why not rely on the far more sophisticated if also unfathomable judgment of actual human beings, the same intuitive power that enabled John Warner to change a stranger’s life by suggesting “Gravity’s Rainbow”? Even the mechanized, crowd-sourced versions of such recommendations — whether provided by Amazon or such social networking sites as GoodReads and LibraryThing — have aided readers.

But, as Stanton points out, social networks can only tell you about books that other readers themselves already know about and have taken the trouble to read and review. They’re heavily weighted toward books that are well-known and successful, as well as toward more recent titles. “Right now,” Stanton says, “the world is not good at finding midlist or old books or books by first-time authors — a huge portion of the pyramid of books out there.” The Book Genome Project doesn’t care about a book’s critical reputation or sales history; all it wants to do is tally up exactly how much “Docks & Warehouses” or “Explicit Descriptions of Physical Intimacy” can be found between its covers. (Or both — paging Edmund White!)

While some of the recommendations I elicited from BookLamp made sense (people who like Dickens do tend to like Wilkie Collins, too), others left me perplexed. Plugging in one of my favorite titles from last year, Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story” — a satire set in New York City in the near future about the doomed affair between a middle-aged Russian immigrant and a much-younger Korean-American woman and ranking high in “Partying/ Deviance” (Shteyngart would be so proud!) — I got back Robert Silverberg’s “The Book of Skulls” — apparently a thriller about four college buddies seeking an immortality-conferring tome guarded by a “mystical brotherhood” in the Arizona desert. Huh? (To be fair, Lara Vapnyar’s “Memoirs of a Muse,” just a little further down the list, is a perfect fit.)

Mostly, though, I appreciate how BookLamp persuades me to look at the books I like in a different light. Ask me why I love Haruki Murakami’s fiction, and I probably wouldn’t begin by praising his depictions of “Suburban Living/ Neighborhoods,” but come to think of it, that’s one of the aspects of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” I remember most vividly and with particular pleasure. I don’t recall an abundance of “Fashion/ Clothing/ Accessories” in the same book, but the next time I reread it, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled.

Further reading:

The fine art of recommending books by Laura Miller

Salon’s review of Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story”

Salon’s review of Haruki Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”