Wag the Book

Leave a comment

I was pulling together a bibliography, you know, like one does, when I realized just how outdated the usual formats are.  Particularly the trinity invoked at the end of Chicago/Turabian—city: publisher, date.  Now, to their credit a number of more recent formats have dispensed with the “city” part.  Most presses have multiple offices and even those of us in the biz can’t always tell which one produced the book, which was, in all probability, printed elsewhere anyway.  Why list the city?  In this internet age, no physical copy of the book may have even been in the office.  The real problem, however, is the date.  Scholars want to know when something was published.  Publishers want to prolong the copyright (seventy years after an author’s death apparently isn’t long enough).  They can do this by using the next year as the copyright, as long as a book’s published in the latter half of the year.

Maybe you’ve had this happen too.  You put a book in your bibliography which, at the time, has a date a year later than it is in real-time.  You’re writing the future, apparently.  Or maybe publishers are just optimistic.  The fact is it’s a fiction.  Citations were invented so that you could find where an idea originated.  Dates can be important for a book that’s gone into multiple editions and you want to be sure to look in the correct one.  I had any illusions about permanency shattered when I realized that publishers routinely fix errors in books with no indication that they’ve done so.  It used to be that, if you knew how to read the printer’s key on the copyright page you could even figure out which printing of a book you held.  All of this fun disappears when we go electronic.

This sense of temporariness is problematic.  People ask me “Why don’t you get a Kindle?”  Books are an investment.  Consider iTunes.  How many times have you had to “rebuy” a song because you changed devices?  Or has your battery died right in the middle of something?  Have you tried to sell an MP3 you no longer listen to in a yard sale?  Books are physical objects—more than the words they contain.  They may be dated before they’re published, but they do have staying power.  Besides, citing an electronic source, what with broken links and all, is a tenuous business.  Those who write books want some indication that what they labor over for so long has a real presence in the world.  Even if you can’t say, precisely, when or where it was published.

A Slice of Pi

2 Comments

Raster images are made of pixels. MP3 files fit into neat little squares. Who owns a watch with an obsolete dial anymore? We live in the digital age. We are satisfied with less. We are told—and who dares question?—that digitization is more precise than any old analogue technique. There really are not curved surfaces anywhere. At lunch with a friend recently, this topic came up. Again. It is a conversation I’ve had before. Not everything can be quantified. Once upon a time, there was something called “quality of life.” No more can Nigel Tufnel claim, “Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten.” Everything is ten.

If you don’t believe me, take a digital image and enlarge it. At some point the edges will grow fuzzy. That’s only because our eyes can’t focus on the smallness of the pixels. Keep on enlarging. Eventually you’ll come to the point where the little squares, the pixels, show their characteristic stairway to Heaven. Then go to your favorite art museum. Look at a painting. Get as close as the docent will allow you. Where are the pixels? Or get to know someone with a high quality camera. Preferably one that handles film larger than 35 millimeters. Watch them at the enlarger. The images get bigger, the edges remain sharp and curved. Where are the pixels? Some of us may be too old to truly tell the difference, but try breaking out your old LP’s. If you can find a turntable try one out. Then listen to the CD. Can’t tell the difference? Try putting it up to eleven.

IMG_2535

The classic manual aptitude test has both round and square pegs. We’ve all been told that you can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, but we do it all the time. Life is full of circles, swirls, curlicues. We don’t teach our children to read cursive anymore. The square pegs on the keyboard are sufficient for every possible form of communication. There’s no need to sit back and wonder at the implications that pi is a non-repeating, infinite decimal number. You can’t find the area or perimeter of a circle without it. Nature is stunningly rococo with its spirals, from non-pixelated ripples in the water to the colossal swirls of galaxies so large that the human mind can’t comprehend them. For that you need a computer. And just to be safe, you better make sure that it’s one that can go up to eleven.