Writing is for reading

A. Writing is for reading the looking at function is secondary

It’s almost to-the-month-annually that a contribution about a topic related to «reading» or «writing» is asked. The regularity of the inquiries is convincing, and I hope to pursue the topic as an admittedly slow study of sorts. This time I would like to be very simplistic, quoting here a text I had written in 2016 at almost full length (Part B), and then adding 3 observations at the end (Part C).
Why recycle an old text in the first place? Basically because reading the piece now, I was struck by its positivity. Already the intro with Umberto Eco is so naïve and happy-go-lucky, it’s uncanny. Almost the whole piece, although dealing with a potentially political topic, is basically a-political and optimistic… It can only be from before the US had voted in 2016. That’s personal, and it’s not, but writing this today, such a-political tone is just not longer thinkable. I’m much more negative about «what’s going on» these days. So I’d like to use some observations regarding how writing and reading is done to describe today’s media in part C of this piece, as the pessimistic counterpart to B – and I also give the stage to the late Kurt Imhof, even if only briefly. But he’ll have the last word, I promise. Those who knew him know, he always had it, in a way.

B. Form matters. Minimal, tradition. On writing, reading and paperbacks

When the news broke that Umberto Eco had died, it was a reminder that his work is relevant for this essay. After all, Eco is responsible for one of the most popular novels and movies in which books play the lead role. Since Eco’s ​‹The Name o​f the Rose› was published in 1980, books and texts, and librarians, and readers, have been identified as history-making protagonists. If we ignore the plot, which has been called a «pedestrian» attempt at a crime story, and if we strip out the medieval masquerade and dry-ice fog, we can extract an overarching theme: the role of manuscripts and books in society. ​‹The Name o​f the Rose› illustrates what texts are capable of: inform, excite, kill. In Eco’s novel, the book is «on fire», it’s the amalgam of knowledge, power, craftsmanship and gossip. Today when the printed book has to constantly defend itself against its digital enemies, it’s reassuring to see how Eco gave it such an invincible, leading role.
So with the image in your head of Sean Connery in a monk’s robe saving a manuscript from a medieval library ablaze, I’d like you to exchange that manuscript for a cheap paperback. It’s an interesting moment, isn’t it? The form of the book being saved does matter – which is the point that I’m attempting to describe in this text: books, in their specific forms, can provoke direct actions, and, because of that, it’s necessary to pay attention to how they are conceived, made, designed and distributed.

Writing, typing

The thesis underlying all of the above and below is that when it comes to the effect and reception of books, they are not simply isolated texts, but their context also matters. How and when they’re written matters, and how and when they’re produced matters. Regarding the «how», writing is a very manual, objectified process, it’s not just «done». Writing is material. It is hardware, not software. The best ​bon mot to illustrate this proposal is Truman Capote’s dismissal of Jack Kerouac’s speedy style of writing as «it isn’t writing at all, it’s typing». The tool that transfers the letters onto paper or screen is a crucial part of any text’s production and the list of authors and their relationships to their writing tools is long. Their allies are pens, pencils, typewriters of various models, computers and sometimes typists – Dostoyevsky famously d​ictated his novel ​​‹The Gambler› to a stenographer. Another novelist, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, self reflects in ‹L’urgence et la patience› (2012) on a series of relationships to typewriters he has owned, and how they influenced his writing – and how more recently two grayish PowerBooks, two white iBooks and a MacBook Pro became his companions. Toussaint also describes the particular way in which the word processing software assists in laying out his manuscripts. He first works with compact pages, overloaded with characters, using Helvetica, with minimal line space – all in order to create very dense text blocks, hard to read, and discouraging to re-read and re-edit. Toussaint is aware of all aspects of the materiality of writing. He controls the process. He defines severe restrictions and, as he says, imposes clear, hard training conditions, only at the last moment switching the font to Times New Roman, pleasing and legible, with plenty of line space, to be then sent to the publisher.

What we say, how we say it

Think of the same text set printed in different versions, say in a magazine, or paperback, or hardcover. The reading experience will certainly be of a very different nature. Reading is sensitive to the style of writing, and in certain aspects to typography, as well as to the material and physical vehicle of the text. Robin Kinross has previously summarised such influence of the form of the book and its reading experience in an article about «typography for reading»: «…there is no single act of reading, only an endless number of particular texts and particular circumstances.» As a reader we’re constantly reconfiguring what we’re reading and the context in which we’re reading it. Kinross gives an example worth quoting at length: «So too the larger scale of material embodiment gives meaning to a text. A poem will have certain meanings when published in the writer’s 96-page collection of texts, ​‹The Skies of Madrid›. Fifteen years later it appears in this author’s 300-page ‹​Poems 1962–2012›. In the big collection, the poem struggles for attention, having to share a page with another piece and facing two other short poems. The design of this collection is mean, the lines are broken, where in the 96-page book they were given the space to run without breaks. The poem reads less effectively, as if seen through a fog and with other things competing for your attention. A designer might work to mitigate the pressures of the big collection, by careful adjustments in design of the pages – but the meanings of the poem will inevitably be slightly different from those of its appearance in the earlier book.»
In other words, we may theorise about reading and typography but it is key to remain aware that a particular physical context is always part of any act of reading. You might even adapt to your immediate surrounding, the smells, conversations, and noise that pose challenging factors for any reading. Yet again, the form of the text, its design and materiality, are without doubt crucial to how we read it.
It was John Berger who 1972 described this pragmatically in the ‹Note to the reader› in his seminal paperback ​Ways of Seeing: «We have tried to extend and elaborate the [ideas from the television series ​Ways of Seeing.] They have influenced not only what we say but also how we have set about trying to say it. The form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained within it.»

(…)

This excerpt is ca. 70% of a text written in March 2016 and published 2017 within the book on Lothar Reher’s astonishing design work for the paperback series Spektrum: ‹Dressed in Black›, edited by Wayne Daly and Adrien Vasquez, published by Precinct, London.

C. Two more and one less recent observations
C.1 Emails and leaks

Words never come easy. And so I retreated to a bastion of words, the National Library in Bern and the reading room with its quietly humming ventilation system. The library used to have a laptop-free zone – but that’s history, and so I’m typing this on my laptop logged into the library’s wi-fi and am re-reading a recent piece by Nathan Heller for the New Yorker which starts: «A measure of industrial progress is the speed with which inventions grow insufferable. (…) Think of e-mail. Or, rather, try not to think of e-mail, since, chances are, while you floss, steep tea, make love, or read these sentences, new messages are proliferating in your inbox, colonizing your time and your brain.» Well, they actually flock into my inbox while I type this. I know it very well. My computer stoically reminds me of new messages. I could change that setting, but I don’t – don’t ask me why – and I also keep receiving short messages, calendar updates, while I’m typing this. It’s basically a mystery how these words and lines assemble on the screen at all with all this distraction. But then, the computer is not the problem itself and there’s hardly a statement that sums up more efficiently what I want to say than the already quoted Capote’s «That’s not writing, that’s typing». Since we’re all bound to keyboards and laptops – are we still capable to distinguish the intensity and urgency of those two things: writing a proper article or typing «Perfect! See you Wednesday then! best» in an email response? In his article Nathan Heller continues that: «The true wellspring of civilization isn’t writing; it is editing.» Yet, and that’s where Heller is aiming at, we rarely spend a second even attempting to edit an e-mail. We send them after typing the last letter, minute by minute, trusting that the receiver knows about the nature of the format. And why do I care about e-mails at all? Because, and it’s again Heller who puts the finger on it: Only when e-mails are suddenly made public, we see into the dark, dark depths of human communication. In a time where we witness e-mail leaking weekly or more often Heller is right to resume: «Given that e-mail leaks can imperil governments, it seems odd that correspondents spend so little time reviewing basic work before they press send.»
So, we’ve got our technology and ourselves as far that we don’t have to sit down and write, or dictate or think any longer to «correspond». We do it while commuting on a busy train, while sitting in meetings, while listening to family on the phone, while walking to a deli to get lunch or while waiting for someone somewhere, anywhere, and anytime. And it doesn’t matter, because we all do it. The times when we were surprised that a message was sent at 11pm are definitely over. But it does matter when these messages are leaked and snowball into major scandals up to the point to even decide presidential elections. Two decades ago, Christoph Meili had to actually steal kilos of documents from the Bankverein and save them from being shredded to leak them to the press. Today it is so much less physical to hack e-mail accounts and leak thousands of messages to the press and they, by word search, will find what they’re looking for. As a result we learn a lot and probably a lot of nothing. But in election times every comment matters, for example when we know that the subject line of an August 2015 email sent by Mr Podesta to Hillary Clinton and one of her closest aides, Huma Abedin read «Needy Latinos and 1 easy call» that was probably written typed thoughtlessly during an Uber-ride to an airport. But now it’s opinion-changing. The privately typed gets worldwide attention. An imbalance that is macabre and eyeopening at the same time. Even more so if you realize how «simple» e-mail communication seems, but how complex its technical aspects are as Dennis Tenen points out in his book ‹Plain text, the poetics of computation›: «The move from paper to such composite media carries with it a profound shift in the physical affordances of the everyday document. Not much space separates ink from paper. There, text lies flat, in two dimensions. What you see is truly what you get. Not so on screens connected to other drives, keyboards, and screens. Composite media extend into the third dimension, away from the reader and deep into the bowels of the machine.» The texts we formulate and read today are far more complex than we think them to be. And they are rarely read or published in accordance to how they were written.

C.2 Tweets and journalists

Will it change how we formulate our correspondence? Will we read again before sending, or even read more attentively? Will someone like Donald Trump Jr. maybe change a subject line such as: «Russia – Clinton – private and confidential» into something less word-searchable before replying? It’s not very likely. The press probably will happily profit from careless correspondence in the near future.
Why bother? Primarily, I would say, because it is now daily business how the media and politicians use private correspondence to defame, manipulate and agitate. «E-mails!» Trump can shout at a rally, and the crowd responds «Lock her up!» The same goes for how media on the left and right and in the middle use e-mail content for scandalous headlines. If good for a headline, the private enters the public completely out of context.
Take Twitter for example. For a long time it seemed the forum for those who are most interested in «immediate news or gossip». I knew programmers take to it, and journalists to send or access information as soon as they’re spoken in press conferences. But it seemed to be «under editorial control» somehow, used by those who know how to read and write tweets. Or maybe, tweets were tweets. We knew it’s «that sort of texts you type or read when visiting the rest rooms». These days, well, that’s a little different. When the press goes: «Today, the president issued in his statement…» they simply refer to one of his latest squeals on Twitter. Which, to be honest, is tragic and ridiculous at the same time. It’s like e-mails times ten. It’s not even typing any more. It’s just thumbing on a screen and with the help of an auto-correction and word-completing software the effort of the intellectual area in your brain is minimized. And this, actually, is a larger phenomena than just the US president’s habits. It is more and more day to day business in the media, to use any Tweet as a reliable source.
The problem is, tweets are so instant, so direct and personal and private – they’re difficult to really condemn. The locker room talk is too easily pardoned. Tweets come and go. They’re sent out proudly – and are nonchalantly deleted in a «I said that? Well, I probably did, but I did not mean it, did I?» kind of way. But what’s probably even worse is how the media seem so obsessed with Twitter as a primary source that those quick and dirty statements are run after like stinky bones thrown into a round of neglected dogs. (Sorry dogs!) And, of course, those who know, they also know when to throw which kind of bones to send the dogs this or that way. But before this develops in a media-phobic rant, it’s better to move on.

C.3 Kurt Imhof (1956–2015)

The previous two sub-chapters were simple observations, dreadful content, but simple observations. There is an apparent imbalance of the public and private spheres. E-mail and Twitter, as formats of «digital communication», are falling into a twilight zone of the private and the public. Would these contents remain where they’re supposed to be, namely with the receiver who knows about the rushed and intimate format, nothing much would happen. Only when transferred into the public realm of mass-media, is there an outcry and response.
Keywords such as «the public sphere» and «the private sphere», «scandals», «personalisation», that’s Kurt Imhof territory. Imhof was (my) professor at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. I remember him as a character, alert, ready to provoke a discussion any time. We knew the lecture would start when he slammed his motorbike helmet onto the desk. When he sadly passed away two years ago, I felt one of the last of the rare species of smoking, arguing, inquisitive intellectuals had left the building. But I did not foresee how his theories had been a prediction of today’s events, almost uncannily so.
Imhof’s theory was that of Social Change, «Theorie des sozialen Wandels», which was building on Horkheimer and Adorno’s media scepticism, and further on Jürgen Habermas’ «Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit» and others such as Richard Sennett’s «tyranny of intimacy». To boil it down: Up to the 1960s private news would only find their ways into the Swiss media through such things as death announcements, obituaries and court reports. The rest was proper news. Only slowly did the so called Boulevard journalism, plus the events of 1968 and the 1970s turn this system up side down and new, small, local media and especially radio stations started a boom of emotional, private news in the public sphere. And all that within no more than 20 or so years. As a result, media need political, personal, private scandals to receive attention. The race for exclusive private news was on and society, politicians, starlets, CEOs jumped on the running train and adapted by feeding these turmoil to the press. What has been a conservative press landscape, controlled by the political parties, had become attention driven mass media. Imhof had described this looking back, for the 1960s to the 1990s. Today, looking at Breitbart, Fox News etc. they are just the continuation of that creepy spiral towards pure agitation and scandalisation. And in parallel the private becomes stronger and stronger of public interest and savvy manipulators understand perfectly how seemingly private communication channels such as Twitter, e-mail or late night calls to journalists tick exactly these boxes of the attention-craze. The personal, private, scandalous, when leaked to the press occupies the news and headlines and so detracts from proper problems and reports on what really goes wrong besides just stupid comments and swaggering. Knowing how that kind of «news by tweet» is typed into a smartphone, without much thought and sense for grammar, one truly wonders how it came to be seen as «exclusive source of serious content and lucidity». Kurt Imhof has seen it coming, this spiralling down the drain, and it’s a shame he’s not around to comment. He probably would be in the media daily, analysing, commenting dryly, pointing out that scandals are naturally part of transforming societies and societies in crisis and so, we’ll have to sit it out this mess and hope real independent news will hit back soon