Trying to be artful-some thoughts on Ali Smith's Artful

Ali Smith~Artful
I've been trying to finish this post for a week or so now and much of the problem has been that problem of writing about something you like in a way that connects to other people.Especially a book and trying to avoid the rehashing of the entire plot and wanting to communicate what punches or what's worth about the book without giving the whole thing away while also trying to practice a bit of what was picked up in the reading process.

Even the title of the book can be read different ways. Declarative-Artful (by) Ali Smith. Adjectivally-Artful Ali Smith like Dicken's the Artful Dodger who appears and disappears throughout the work. To explore the questions of form, time, edge, reflection Smith creates a/the main character who dialogues with the artifacts and occasional presence of the ghost of a former lover or spouse (hard to tell from the text). Not that it really matters. Artful may also refer to the wanderings that Smith's character takes through the left-behind essay sketches that have been left behind. These sketches become the meat of the explorations of time, form, edge, reflection and edge with various interjections from Smith's character.
Almost exactly halfway through the book, in the "On Form" section Smith states that "Everything can be more than itself. Everything IS more than itself." This book could be read as either a series of narrative-lectures or narrative introductions to lectures or even more complicatedly as explorations of the various connections/interplays of language and text, hidden behind simplicity of text and language. In order to get to the point though of realizing that everything is more than itself requires time, the first essay. In this first essay Smith's character spends time talking about how books require more time than they are often given. And while the character doesn't rub it in, there's obviously been a huge amount of time spent with these texts as they are liberally quoted and occasionally mashed up, including salient points regarding the author's history, biography or the reasons for their (the texts) being written.
Everything IS more than itself. Simplicity can be harder to suss out and perhaps more difficult to dig into because of, at first blush, the limited numbers of ways in or places to grasp hold seem extremely limited. (Think Vonnegut, Saunders, Cummings or even Eggers.)The flip-side of everything is more than itself is that everything connects but only if you know. It helps to know everything but that's usually not possible and so it takes time to grasp the form, examining the edges reflecting on what the text has to offer. Reflecting on what the text 'says' or does. Since the reader is capable of knowing a lot the reader can then recognizing the layers of meanings and interplay that exist between texts. How the ghost of a lover/spouse, leaving behind essays could, possibly, be tied back to Barthes' death of the author. Where the author, imaginary but dead, haunts the reader's character who is also, periodically, the author, flipping the text back and forth for the benefit of the reader while diving off after the plays and subtleties of the whole reason the reader is there in the first place. Time. Reflection. Offer. Form. Edge.

I will say that at the very least, there is now a new e.e. cummings poems on my window, printed out on the plastic sheeting that used to be used for overhead projectors. In order to see out into the hills, and trees outside, in this particular pane, one must read the poem overlaid over the clouds or sky. So that a poem about a day and goodness of the God who created it is held up against that creation as reminder, emblem and reflection.

"I thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of a sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting  touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my heart awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
                                                      ~E.E. Cummings

Books, reading and owning our stuff

Leon Wieseltier has this article on The New Republic's website which is a wonderful and thoughtful examination of his book shelves as he moves and the impact and nature of the book as artifact. There's some distinct similarities between this and Walter Benjamin's essay Unpacking My Library found in Illuminations.
This article has been kicking around the interwebs for the past week and made it onto at least one of the librarian list-servs I subscribe to. One of the librarians responded to the article with the suggestion of the a technology that would seek to individuate (his word-and a good one) the use of ebooks. Driving at a technology that would help or cause ebooks to seem less infinite or as Wieseltier suggests "There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints." So why not then create a technology that allows one to fingerprint their electronic copy? This isn't a bad idea except waiting for waiting for some app to cause ebooks to feel or be more personal misses the point of what texts do. What follows is the somewhat rambling email I sent back to this individual. It's nothing new but I spent some time on it and figured I would share it here.

While appealing this notion of “individuation” (good word!)  seems counter-intuitive to the very nature of technology, as it has been presented to the end user/consumer. The customization of an interface or device is not the same as individuation even if those who push customization as personalization would like the users to think so. Technology does not succeed based on its ability to create individualized experiences but rather via a platform that is abstracted out enough to pull in the widest possible user group that is willing to bend to the concession of the maker’s terms. The iPhone is a good example of this. The closest thing to an individualized iPhone experience requires jailbreaking or hacking the phone’s operating system in such a way as to remove the system of blocks that come installed by Apple. The problem is you have to do it every time a new iOS is issued so that it takes a significant amount of work to maintain one’s “individuation” of device because the content providers don’t particularly want individualized users.
My own struggle with the idea of individuating technology is the buying into the idea that the digital copy on my device is unique. One does not typically purchase books with the expectation of replacing the same volume in 3-4 years because that volume has become obsolete.  However this is the expectation when purchasing a computer and I would suggest e-readers are included in this category. The principle of planned obsolescence prevents the digital item from truly becoming an artifact that is able to genuinely fingerprinted by the user especially when the content provider still retains power of control over the items on that device. (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) As the physical book is self-contained one is not worried about porting previous purchases from a pre-existing platform to a new one. Really the main problem one has with moving a book is making sure there is room on one’s bookshelf.
Since the Kindle, and other e-readers, require an online connection any option for individuation would be subject to this connection being monitored, not to be overly paranoid here, by the content provider. The similar parallel are the discount cards we use at the grocery store-even if we get gas points/etc. those points are simply in exchange for getting our buying habits. (See Vaidhyanathan’s Googlization of Everything) As new books are purchased this monitoring would leverage that information to track, compile and then market the consumer’s taste choices (Facebook, Google, etc.) for additional profits. It’s not the other reader(s) this technology would be benefiting in sharing the previous reader’s “fingerprints” but the publishers, e-readers or content providers.

I don’t mean to sound cranky about e-readers. I think they are a great idea, necessary to a certain extent. and provide healthy competition to the overblown prices of physical objects, also to an extent. I think, based solely on anecdotal experience, that more people are reading with their e-readers.
The problem with most, if not all digital content, is that the idea of owning has dramatically shifted. The expectation of owning our digital content so that we can fingerprint it (marginalia, sharing) is going to be at the mercy of content providers unless we are willing, I think, to hack our devices so that the content on those devices is truly ours.