Category: Digital Reading

robertogreco — This is how I read

robertogreco — This is how I read

James Bridle tells us to “Stop Lying About What You Do” and in doing so, he describes how I read.

I don’t read like I used to—although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I rarely finish books. I’ve always had a habit of abandoning novels 50-100 pages before the end. I don’t know why, I’ve always done that. I think I’m doing it more and I don’t mind because I think my critical senses have improved and by eradicating book guilt I’ve reached a point where I am happy to cast things aside. I read 5, 10 books at once. I read them on paper and electronically as the mood takes me.

I read with continuous partial attention and I don’t care that I am frequently interrupting my own reading. I despise the discourse that says we are all shallow, that we are all flighty, distracted, not paying attention. I am paying attention, but I am paying attention to everything, and even if my knowledge is fragmented and hard to synthesise it is wider, and it plays in a vaster sphere, than any knowledge that has gone before.

About a year later, he repeats:

I read books, but I don’t finish them. Let’s stop pretending. My reading and the wobbly tower of ideas built alongside and atop it is not a street, a line, it’s a topology, a crystal growing in space, layering the insides of the seizure and projecting into it. It is counterproductive to suggest otherwise.

There is nothing more to add.

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Butler: I don’t have access to this kind of thing on computer but, oddly enough, what you’re talking about sounds very much like the way I start looking for ideas when I’m not working on anything. Or when I’m just letting myself drift, relax.

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect.

I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.

Internet Archive on Twitter: “It seems like we should mention that there are no fines when you borrow an ebook:”

“It seems like we should mention that there are no fines when you borrow an ebook.“

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

The fashionability of Pelicans, which lasted at least into the 70s, was connected to this breaking open of radical new ideas to public understanding – not in academic jargon but in clearly expressed prose. But it was also because they looked so good. The first Pelicans were, like the Penguins, beneficiaries of the 30s passion for design. They had the iconic triband covers conceived by Edward Young – in Lane’s words, “a bright splash of fat colour” with a white band running horizontally across the centre for displaying author and title in Gill Sans. A pelican appeared flying on the cover and standing on the spine. After the war, Lane employed as a designer the incomparable Jan Tschichold, a one-time associate of the Bauhaus and known for his Weimar film posters. His Pelicans had a central white panel framed by a blue border containing the name of the imprint on each side.

In the 60s the books changed again, to the illustrative covers designed by Germano Facetti, art director from 1961 to 72. Facetti, a survivor of Mauthausen labour camp who had worked in Milan as a typographer and in Paris as an interior designer, transformed the Penguin image, as John Walsh has written, “from linear severity and puritanical simplicity into a series of pictorial coups”. The 60s covers by Facetti (eg The Stagnant Society by Michael Shanks), and by the designers he took on – Jock Kennier (eg Alex Comfort’s Sex in Society), Derek Birdsall (eg The Naked Society) – are ingenious, arresting invitations to a world of new thinking.

Jenny Diski has written of subscribing in the 60s to “the unofficial University of Pelican Books course”, which was all about “gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, JK Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the floor of the bedsit increased.”

“If you weren’t at university studying a particular discipline (and even if you were),” she goes on, “Pelican books were the way to get the gist of things, and education seemed like a capacious bag into which all manner of information was thrown, without the slightest concern about where it belonged in the taxonomy of knowledge. Anti-psychiatry, social welfare, economics, politics, the sexual behaviour of young Melanesians, the history of science, the anatomy of this, that and the other, the affluent, naked and stagnant society in which we found ourselves.”

…

Owen Hatherley has described the Pelicans of the late 60s as “human emancipation through mass production … hot-off-the-press accounts of the ‘new French revolution’ would go alongside texts on scientific management, with Herbert Marcuse next to Fanon, next to AJP Taylor, and all of this conflicting and intoxicating information in a pocket-sized form, on cheap paper and with impeccably elegant modernist covers.”

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

2. The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf (1938)
A collection of essays on literary subjects. The “common reader … differs from the critic and the scholar … He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge.” The Second Common Reader soon followed.

3. An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner (1943)
Pevsner was one of Allen Lane’s best signings (the publisher gave the green light to The Buildings of England series). Pevsner was responsible for the magisterial Pelican History of Art series; An Outline sold half a million copies.

5. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, edited by Boris Ford (from 1954)
Ford was a Leavisite, but Leavis apparently wasn’t best pleased with this spreading of the word to the masses (contributors included TS Eliot, Lionel Trilling and Geoffrey Grigson). But it was a great if always controversial success. One volume, The Age of Chaucer, alone sold 560,000 copies.

6. The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart (1958)
The text on the original Pelican cover reads: “A vivid and detached analysis of the assumptions, attitudes and morals of working-class people in northern England, and the way in which magazines, films and other mass media are likely to influence them.”