Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Festival Season

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

I just returned from the Hay festival, where I took this picture. I challenge anybody to look at it and tell me that Book History doesn’t have some interesting things to say:

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This is an honesty bookshop in a castle, and it’s sort of by the way – but I did think it was interesting that the Hay festival, which takes place in a series of marquees just outside the famous ‘town of books’, is not really a site for bibliomania at all. There, apart from the Oxfam tent and a stall selling those (academically very interesting) ‘classic penguin’ mugs and deckchairs, the cult of the author reigns supreme. It’s very much a show for people interested in the personalities behind books – and, because this is the twenty-first century, the personalities behind TV, journalism, film, illustration, politics, music. The ‘literaryness’ can often fade into the background, for all the bookish props and slogans.

Would it be better if this wasn’t so? Certainly, ‘loving books’ feels more like an aesthetic choice than anything else at this event, but I’m not sure how good a festival it would be if we were trying to prioritise literary culture all the time. Living authors are a great resource (that ‘living’ is important – we don’t always see ‘life’ in our field, and perhaps its at the heart of what a festival is), and I went to some really interesting, and moving, talks.

On the other hand, I think a ‘Festival of Literature and the Arts’ could usefully stop to think, if only for a moment, about the extent to which it represents those things, and the extent to which it simply represents the people who create and consume them. I think this is a more serious distinction than it sounds, because there’s an opportunity here to really foreground some of the things that are great about books, and writing, and literature. These things, and the study of them, are increasingly being viewed with some scepticism by culture at large, as I noted in my previous post. Consider the public image of the literary arts which Hay brings – the trope of the Guardian reader – and consider the kinds of arguments which you could make for them, given that platform. Books aren’t (just) intrinsically wonderful – nor are they (just) the status accessories we litter our shelves with. Nor, indeed, are they (just) access points into the interesting lives of the famous people we want to know more about. They have a greater power, and a greater relevance, and some of that is being lost at Hay right now.

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the festival. I saw Quentin Blake live, and he drew the Enormous Crocodile, and I’m really never going to deny that I got a lot out of that. But I think there’s room for a deeper kind of public engagement here, and I think that at the moment there’s still lots to be said for popping back to Hay when the festival isn’t in season and poking around the many fabulous bookshops by yourself.

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War of the What?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

There are no flying saucers in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. I know, I know. The martians arrive on earth in cylinders. Far less exciting.

Don’t worry, though – a large number of publishers over the years either haven’t read the book, or have been happy to disregard the trivial ‘fact’ that a seminal science fiction text doesn’t conform to one of science fiction’s seminal stereotypes. That’s why you can enjoy this image with me:

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Some excellent soul or other has put an extraordinary number of the different covers of this book online for all to see. It’s a splendid idea, especially once you start using them to crunch stats. I can’t see any cylinders at all, for instance, whilst the tripods (the vehicles used by the martians once they reach the earth’s surface) form by far the largest subcategory of illustrations. The fourth largest category is “Screaming Humans Running at You“, which I particularly enjoy.

What’s interesting, though, is simply to look at the list in chronological order and see how each generation have attempted to market this extremely popular work in different (and similar) ways. I did a project on book covers as a master’s student – it’s a line of inquiry that I’ve more or less had to dispense with in this project. Most of the short stories I’m dealing with don’t have covers of their own, appearing as they do in periodicals. But it’s a fascinating way of thinking about books – how a cover frames your perceptions of a text – and I’d love to do something on it again one day.

I leave you with two more favourites from the collection. One is a favourite because it makes no sense whatsoever, the other because it makes a little too much sense… please enjoy.

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Concerning Anthropology

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

If you were researching the construction of scientific facts, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a book called Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts might prove useful. It’s by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar and it came out in 1979, although you should get the newer 1986 edition because it has an extremely amusing reference to Borges (literally – it’s a reference) in the preface.

The concept is as promising as the title. Latour spends several months in a laboratory in California, living among scientists as an anthropologist would live amongst some strange south sea tribe, immersing himself in their practices and culture in an effort to better understand them. It’s an interesting idea, largely because (for me at least) it underlines the fact that even a layperson who is relatively well informed about science has little to no idea of the actual workings of a lab. This is a point which Latour and Woolgar provide some insight into – they say that scientists distance the knowledge they create from the material conditions of its creation. Science presents itself as pure knowledge, but thinking of it as such in a laboratory, amidst the machinery, caged animals, lab technicians and so on, proves difficult.

Although I don’t outright disagree with any of this, I’ve been having big problems with Latour and Woolgar. I think what makes me uneasy about their project is that whilst they have no problem critiqueing the assumptions of neuroendocrinology (the field in which the lab they study operates) they spend a lot of time making assumptions about the efficacy of anthropological and sociological method, which of course have their origins in exactly the same place.

‘Science studying science’ should be interesting but, for some reason, it isn’t. Jonas Salk, who runs the lab in question, writes in his rather guarded preface that “[t]he authors’ tools and concepts are crude and qualitative, but their will to understand scientific work is consistent with the scientific ethos”. Crude indeed – at one point, the layout of the lab is described through the eyes of a fictitious ‘observer figure’ who has all the cultural touchstones of western society (so he knows what a phone is, for instance) but is completely ignorant of the practices of science. The inevitable result is that science is Othered; appears strange and even ridiculous. These funny people write numbers on test tubes all day, then they throw the test tubes away. Isn’t that weird?! There is no part of any modern society that you couldn’t do this to, and surely one of the most susceptible figures for such a treatment would be this observer figure himself. Imagine if another observer were watching him.

This is a well-documented issue in anthropology, and I am not an anthropologist, so I am not qualified to discuss it. I am not a sociologist or a scientist either, so far from dismissing this book – which may well be of value to anybody working in these areas – I am simply going to say that I, personally, found it tough going, and, whilst thought-provoking, ultimately unrewarding.

I’m not the only one, though. Here’s Martin J. S. Rudwick in The Great Devonian Controversy (1985), another book I’ve been reading lately. It’s quite a long quotation, but I promise it will be worth it:

These ethnographers or microsociologists of science have given some detailed and illuminating accounts of routine procedures in scientific research. But with few exceptions they have described the research in a static manner, failing to show how the procedures are used in a temporal process to develop some new scientific conclusion. Furthermore, they often show an extreme skepticism – or at least, an extreme agnosticism – about the status of the knowledge the scientists claim to be producing. In miminizing if not discounting its reference to any ‘real’ external world of nature, their accounts of science open up a gulf in self-understanding between themselves and the scientists they observe – a gulf which surely no modern anthropologist would find tolerable in the interpretation of exotic cultures.

Then there’s a footnote which proves that this is a reference to Latour and Woolgar. Literally – it’s a reference.

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