Seeing recent book art postings Stumbled Upon has led to two discoveries: 1.) StumbleUpon has grown a hell of a lot since the last time this happened, 2.) There is a small but vocal contingent of people who are morally opposed to book art of any kind when it involves the carving and sculpting of books. Book art objects, such as these two by our man Brian Dettmer, are an abomination for these folks because people should be reading books for the love of God, not slicing them up and selling them as art objects.

They have an argument, if you discount the fact that the advent of mass production in the 19th century has ensured that we will never experience a book shortage. And if you’ve never worked at a bookstore, you might not be aware of the standard practice of regularly dumping large numbers of remaindered and stripped books that won’t sell. And if you haven’t tried it yourself you might not know that forcing people to read books takes all the fun out of them.

But what this sentiment illustrates is that books are still venerated cultural objects with a lot of power, and that’s what gives good book art its power. Artists like Dettmer excite people because they allow them to see these sacred book objects in shocking new ways. They’re doing more to bring awareness to books than the book protectors ever will. They’re giving old books new life (not unlike Google, another foe of some in the trade).

Illustration Art blogger David Apatoff:

In the course of just 100 intense years, comic art has put on display the personalities of some deeply odd people who have produced truly excellent but Quixotic art—a far higher ratio than would ever surface through art museums.

Why is this? Perhaps the medium combines the privacy for artists to sit alone at their drawing board, a little incubation chamber for their neuroses and quirks, with a wide daily audience for the resulting work product. Or maybe the pressure of putting out a daily strip for decades simply drove them nuts.

Can’t believe I missed Brian Dettmer in my pompous Book Art All-Stars roundup. He may be my favorite book sculptor of the bunch because he doesn’t add anything to the books or move anything around, he just carves, recontextualizing existing content.

More at the Haydeé Rovirosa Gallery.

Who needs a cut-up machine when you can embed and combine public-domain book-page slices via Google Books?

UPDATE: “Ironics Light and Dark” above had to replaced with “ROBUST RED-BLOODED REALISM” because the 1901 poetry journal I had originally clipped from disappeared from Google’s index. One of the downsides of embeddable book clips. One of the positive sides is the chance discovery of the public-domain version of lit-blogs (the ‘Chronicle and Comment’ section of 1912 back issues of The Bookman) and the fascinating advertisements of The Reader illustrated monthly circa 1907—defending automobiles, selling talking machines, marketing faux hipster beer as baby medicine and making Grape-Nuts manly. Amazing that “predigested” seems to have been one of the most effective adjectives in the copywriter’s arsenal.

UPDATE II: It’s hard to stay excited about embeddable book clips when Google keeps making adjustments to their index that throw your clippings off and render them incoherent. Screenshots are starting to look good again.

UPDATE III: Eight of the books clipped disappeared from Google’s index 1/24/2008, so this mashup is now a giant screenshot that doesn’t link to anything. Thanks Google!

Back in February, I reviewed all the book-oriented social networks I could find and concluded that what I really wanted was a more personalized version of Google Books. The rich related content with which Google surrounds many books is what makes it so valuable. Compare the book information pages for A History of Underground Comics (for example) side-by-side Mahalo-style on Google Books, LibraryThing and Shelfari.

Today Google Books launched My Library, effectively ending my whining.

Now LibraryThing has a lot of great features and is rolling out new ones constantly—and when it comes to socializing around books, LT and Shelfari are apparently where it’s at—but the one thing none of these bookish social networks offer is full-text search of the books in your collection. Google’s got that and suddenly, for the first time, I’m thinking it might actually be worthwhile to start cataloging my books online. Put in a little entry time and you’ll be able to search the contents of your entire book collection in under a second. They call that a value proposition.

Only problem now is most of the books I’ve been reading lately were published before 1930 by obscure publishing concerns and are as impossible to find in Google Book Search as they are in the real world. But Google’s new embeddable public-domain book-clipping feature pretty much makes up for that.

I can’t stop playing with book covers. The covers, not the books, because novel-reading is for girls. More on the 92Y Blog.

Also can’t stop playing Scrabulous, the Facebook version of Scrabble (thanks, Kristen!). Because I needed another online compulsion and managing eight simultaneous Scrabble games is a great use of my time.

• Stage Nudity: Barely the Beginning
• London’s Switched-on “Radio Love”
• Nabokov’s Complaint—The author of Lolita and Ada in a damning denunciation of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.
• Live Wires—A report on Liberation News Service (LNS), the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), and Intergalactic World Brain (IWB), the three supercharged wire services that supply news to the nation’s 200 underground newspapers.
• Genetic Damage Caused by Coffee
• Stock Trading by Computer—A report on “Instinet,” the revolutionary new system that will eliminate stock exchanges.
• The CIA’s Secret “Streetfighters”—An exclusive report on American operatives now being trained by Scotland Yard to quell urban riots.
• Best-Sellers in Underground Bookstores
• Stimulating Program—A report on Palm Springs’ KPLM-TV’s inadvertent telecast of a stag film.
• Computer Calamities—Case histories of computer malfunctions that resulted in bank accounts being wiped out, elections miscounted, and whole neighborhoods condemned to destruction.

Read the entire 1969 ad dug up by the Times‘ Paper Cuts blog and tell me you’re not ready to send in your $3.99.

Back issues pop up on eBay on occasion but not often. Some charitable soul should do for Avant-Garde what UbuWeb did for Aspen. If I owned any copies I’d help.

For future reference. A brief obsession with Saguaro and phyllotaxis was one of the results of a Tessitura Arts Enterprise Software conference in Tucson last week.

This business of “sensory input” is another old McLuhan theme. He once predicted that the advent of colour television would lead to an increased appetite for spicy foods. Call him a nutcase, but we got our colour television and then suddenly we were all eating Szechuan.

Canadian columnist Philip Marchand’s report on literal-media-observer N. Katherine Hayles’ presentation at a recent Media Ecology Association conference underscores an observation I’ve been selectively making lately: web-centric media theorist types are the biggest book lovers around. “Book fetishists” might be a better term, as the book love I mean has more to do with adoration of the book object than an active interest in author brawls real or staged. After a full day dealing with the unstable, “nervous information” of the computer screen, books are reassuring for their solid physical presence, their smell and their spatial dimension. The words in them are usually older than the ones we read on screens. Their unique qualities become apparent when contrasted with the digital. Who understands this better than the rigorously trained media theorist, carefully attuned to subtle deviations in sensory input? You don’t even have to answer. No one.

Herman Melville:

This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude; perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each of which districts are three lines; one to show the number of days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been seen.

Justin Quinn:

Eeee eeeee eeeeeee eee eeeee eeee eeeeeeeee ee eeee eeeeeee ee eeeeeeee ee eeee eeeeeee ee eeeeeeeee; eeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeee eeee ee eeeee eeeeeeee eee eeeeee eeeeeee eee eee eeeeee eeeeee; eee eeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeee eeee ee eeeee eeeeeeeee eee eeeee eeeee; eee ee eeee eee eeeeee ee eeee eeee eeee eeee eeeee ee eeeee eeeee ee eeeeee eeeeeeee, eee eee eee eeeeee ee eeee eee eeeeee ee eeee ee eeeee eeeeee, eeeee ee eeeee, eeee eeee eeee.

Explanation:

In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language—a basis for visual manufacture.

Source:

High-rise architecture and mini-skirts have much in common.

Image, audio courtesy of UbuWeb.

See also: Getting Rid of Animus

Concrete poetry was modernist in a Greenbergian sense. It embraced all of (Clement) Greenberg’s ideas. The flatness of the picture plane. There was never an illusionistic space in concrete poetries. Hardcore modernist! And it’s extremely graphic. The first time I saw Netscape in January of ‘95, the first thing that really caught me was the interlaced gifs. And I don’t know if you remember that. But at the time on a very slow modem you could actually watch them interlace and fill themselves in. And that is a very similar tactic to what was used in concrete poetry. Concrete poetry often employed the sequential ideas of the flipbook, so that over a succession of pages, like a flipbook you’d actually see a poem grow. This sort of primitive animation that a flipbook gives you was suddenly becoming very visible on the Web. What I was seeing was animation of a gif, but of course the next step was making a gif animated in a series of frames, and with that I thought this is really exactly what concrete poetry was like.

So I took some of my old concrete poetry books (when of course the Web was visual, this was ‘96) and I just scanned a couple of things, cleaned them up, and put them up—and backlit on a flat screen it was as if concrete poetry had found its medium that it had really been searching for. And particularly with the idea of animation, I thought my god this is what concrete poetry had been waiting for, for fifty years is this medium.

—From Archinect’s interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, creator of UbuWeb, one of the first websites I bookmarked when I first got on the web at the New School computer lab in the ’90s.

Box.net has one of the best apps on Facebook right now, because it’s so open-ended. Their Files app stands out amid the Facebook app frenzy because it lets you easily share music, video, photos, images, documents and whatever else you can think of via one handy box.

Well, turns out it’s not just for Facebookers. Widgets are the sixth element, haven’t you heard? Bear witness below.

The downer: videos don’t stream in the widget, unlike in their demo.

UPDATE: But Flash video (.flv) does.

[via Book Patrol]

Listen to this March 20th CalacanisCast interview with Andrew Lih, author of a forthcoming book (the first, surprisingly) about Wikipedia. Then go check out Mahalo again, Jason Calacanis’s new well-funded “human-powered search” project that currently has the blog world perplexed. Suddenly it becomes clear: Jason wasn’t able to convince the Wikipedians to let him help monetize Wikipedia’s search, so he’s building his own for-profit mini-Wikipedia lite.

Wikipedia articles are in a sense “human-curated SERPs” (search engine results pages, for those who don’t speak acronym) that happen to show up very high for a plethora of Google searches. Mahalo wants to join them for the top 10,000 search terms, and sell ads.

Mahalo is not so much a search engine or a directory or an “expert guide” site, it’s a mini-Wikipedia run by paid editors (Mahalopedians?) designed to be accessed the way the majority of internet users come into contact with Wikipedia: through Google searches. Eventually a few people may actually start their search at Mahalo, if they hear the “we offer Google results for stuff we don’t have, so what do you lose?” selling proposition enough times.

Note that if Wikipedia was a private company, it would be worth billions.

I still prefer Wikipedia. But Mahalo’s not going away.

“Metadata is what you know. Data is what you’re looking for.”
-David Weinberger, author, Everything is Miscellaneous

“The Facebook guys are betting that the next fad or fun thing will be built on Facebook, not the internet.”
-James Hong, co-founder, Hot or Not

“I’ve been writing a blog comparing web 2.0 to hip-hop. The five elements of web 2.0 vs. the five elements of hip-hop. You know about the five elements of hip-hop, right? There’s breakdancing, DJing, graffiti, MCing and, um.. another one. Then there’s the five elements of web 2.0: blogging, RSS, podcasting, tagging and embedding.”
-Guy in the row in front of me

It was not a good time for the arts. We barely worked at all, and could not obtain a commission to present our songs during the five-day festival of Minerva. The atmosphere was grim and deteriorating daily. An occasional lyrical collaborator of ours, primarily a writer of Atellan farces, had just been burned alive in the amphitheater for penning a line which had an amusing double-entendre. Another collaborator, best known for the short poem in hexameters titled “Reply to Brutus’ Eulogy of Cato,” was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Mnester the comedian, and, as punishment, was sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a snake and a monkey, and cast into the river. All pantomime actors and their hangers-on had been expelled from the city. People could now be executed for carrying a coin bearing Augustus’ head into a lavatory or brothel. Foreign kings were detained in the capital - Maroboduus the German, Rhascuporis the Thracian, Archelaus of Cappadocia - all of whose kingdoms had lately been reduced to provincial status.

We survived on meager payment from the occasional private concert given on a Sunday afternoon in the quarters of a wealthy family originating from Aricia, which boasted many ancestral busts of senators. Woe to us, the payment from these private concerts was made in barley bread instead of the customary wheat ration. While we played for varying members of the family, others congregated in the anteroom and gesticulated violently, plotting an attack on the Senate House to kill as many senators as convenient, bickering and accusing one another of incompetence for a recent failed attempt in which the ringleader did not give the agreed upon signal of letting his gown fall to expose his shoulder.

We waxed reflective on more prosperous times. Gone were the days when our great patron and protector held sway, and we were paid handsomely for our performances: ten packs of grain and an additional ten pounds of oil, fresh hand-pressed cheese and green figs of the second crop. Back in those days of vanity, we would find the time to soften the hair on our legs by singeing them with red-hot walnut shells. Who among us cannot recall our great benefactor, resplendent in his glory, the abolisher of the half-per-cent auction tax, attending the garrison Games and throwing down javelins at a wild boar let loose in the arena? On the discovery of his passing, because of the dark stains which covered his body and the foam on his lips, poison was greatly suspected. With his death announcement, the populace threw their household gods into the streets, and princes shaved their beards as a token of profound grief. Not knowing how to survive in this difficult environment, we debated whether to consecrate all our songs jointly to Neptune and Mars, and cautiously venture back into the wild interior, with the intention of subsisting there indefinitely. How else could artists such as we hope to practice their art in such godless times?

There’s a lot more where that came from on the Twenty % Tippers’ website. No idea what they sound like but they’ve earned a following with these subway flyers.

Previously: The Christ Conspiricy [sic]