"This great and trivial story": a love-affair with print

At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices. Angoulême, although its paper-making industry kept it in contact with Parisian printing, was still using those wooden presses from which the now obsolete metaphor 'making the presses groan' originated. Printing there was so much behind the times that the pressmen still used leather balls spread with ink to dab on the characters. The bed of the press holding the letter-filled 'forme' to which the paper is applied was still made of stone and so justified its name 'marble'. The ravenous machines of our time have so completely superseded this mechanism--to which, despite its imperfections, we owe the fine books produced by the Elzevirs, the Plantins, the Aldi and the Didots--that it is necessary to mention this antiquated equipment which Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard held in superstitious affection; it has its part to play in this great and trivial story.

--Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac, trans. by Herbert J. Hunt

I am fascinated with late-18th-century/early-19th-century French and British printing and bookselling. It started as a fluke. I was introduced to the Albion press owned by my university's rare books library at around the same time that I was brainstorming the NaNoWriMo project that became The Printer's Tale, and I decided on a whim that my main character and her father should be printers. I already knew that they lived in provincial pre-revolutionary France, I already knew the thrust of my main character's story, I just needed to know what she did for a living before the novel got started.

I thought this would perhaps be a minor detail, but as the present working title would suggest, printing quickly came to take up a great deal of space in the novel. I talked with librarians, checked out musty old books, and researched the history and the art of printing. I parlayed this information into a final project for one of my first-semester courses, in addition to insinuating it piecemeal into my November novel, but even after the semester was over, this new-found fascination wouldn't leave me alone. I examined the bindings of old books in the local used bookstores; I sought out laid paper and fell in love with the way it felt beneath my fingers. I enrolled in a research seminar taught at the rare books library. When I had the opportunity, I took a graduate history course entitled The Hand-Printed Book in Its Historical Context, where I spent six weeks learning the history of hand-printing via a series of example books culled from the library's extensive catalogue, and six weeks using that same Albion press that had sparked the obsession a few years earlier to typeset and print a short manuscript of my own.

In some academic circles it's considered a bit gauche to pay too much attention to the materiality of the text. Yes, changing conventions in printing, editing, and publishing do affect the way texts are received and read, but--so the assumption seems to run--not the way texts are written, which is what should matter. It's the job of a literary scholar to work with the text at hand, not to fuss with the fact that the books we read now are things as well as texts.

But while the things I've learned about printing and bookselling may not be central to most of the work that I do, I nonetheless feel a frisson of excitement every time a literary text references the mode of its own production. When I opened up my copy of Lost Illusions and read this first paragraph, I was transported back to the Printing Room in the second story of the Bancroft Library, sunlight streaming in through the huge windows, myself standing poised with hands near the press bar as a classmate ran the roller over the ink which made its snicker-snack reverse-suction sound, waiting for the forme to be inked and the paper to be positioned before pulling the press down, thud-click, and releasing it again to reveal a perfectly-printed page.

When The Printer's Tale begins, provincial printing is already dying out. The catalyst for a great deal of the story is the reluctant necessity of my main character giving up her life as a printer in order to find work that pays. But the magic of the novel--and it's me we're talking about, so at times this magic is literal--is so tied up in printing, in the idea of work done with one's hands. The groaning of the wooden press, the sickly-sweet turpentine smell of the ink, the cool lead of the type sorts, these things matter. And part of what I love about working in the eighteenth century is that sometimes I can feel them there, behind every book I read, reminding me of the number of hands that these words have passed through and worked their magic upon.

It's not a particularly academic pleasure. It won't make itself heard in my seminar papers, or future conference papers or articles or dissertation chapters. But it is a pleasure that, for me at least, gives my academic work weight and heft, that makes it more material and that makes it matter.

What I Do With English

Today, I received my BA in English from UC Berkeley. I was selected to speak at the English Department's commencement; this is the speech that I gave.

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When I tell people I’m an English major, the most common response is, “What are you going to do with that?” It’s one of my least favorite questions, but I’ve come to realize that it’s an important one. What are we going to do with English? What have we been doing with it, or in the name of it, in the years we’ve spent as part of Berkeley’s English department?

To most people, all that English majors do is read books, talk about books, and write papers about books. As a result, we don’t seem to be doing very much. But I, for one, value English precisely for its focus on the process of literary analysis. We rarely ask questions that have concrete answers, so our field of study is not defined by the results it produces, but by the practices that help us arrive at our conclusions. No matter what you’re going on to “do” with English, I believe there is value in having learned how to read, how to talk, and how to write like an English major.

English majors read differently from almost every other person I know: we re-read, partly out of necessity, but almost equally out of desire. The second reading is when the words that captivated at the level of story-telling begin to connect to each other across the lines of a poem, or the pages of a novel. Things begin to stand out: a phrase repeated, or not; a pattern, a symbol, a sign. Slowly, something like meaning begins to emerge, simply because we have taken the time to look for it. The pleasure and the danger of this sort of reading is that there is no limit to the number of times that a text can be read. For an English major, reading is never actually finished, only temporarily abandoned, to be reassumed whenever the book is opened again. I think there’s something deeply admirable about this kind of re-reading. After all, a willingness to re-read is also always a willingness to question—and perhaps even counter—first impressions. If English is about the process of re-reading, then it’s also about being continually open to new information, even if that information forces you to change your mind.

The same process of self-questioning is at work when we talk as English majors about the things we read. Looking back on my time spent at Berkeley, it strikes me that so much of my education has been accomplished through informed conversation with professors and with peers, working in tandem to explain, defend, and question our differing perspectives. The purpose of these conversations is not to argue until a single perspective emerges victorious, but rather to strengthen and sharpen all perspectives. In a world increasingly rife with violence that stems from the failure to consider alternate points of view, I believe we need more people who think—and who talk—like English majors. We need more people who are willing to have their opinions swayed by a reasoned discussion, just as we need more communities willing to support this kind of conversation.

As students of English, we’ve learned more than just a specialized vocabulary for talking about the things we read. We’ve learned the importance of continually interrogating our own practices and those of others with the aim of making them better. In the process, we’ve developed the kind of mental flexibility that allows us to think with others, even if we don’t always arrive at an agreement.

So, what are we going to do with that? If you ask me, we’re going to do a lot. Whatever professions we find ourselves pursuing—wherever we live and work, whatever we come to love—we will bring with us a willingness to revise our own assumptions and an openness to the ideas of others. We will model a way of thinking, and ultimately a way of living, that values process over products and individuality over conformity. And we will become integral members of multiple communities, including those that our unique outlook has allowed us to create.

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I might not actually belong to multiple communities yet. But I sure as hell belong to this one:

The Gravity of Haunted Places

When I was studying in London, doing my reading for a course about the representation of London in the eighteenth century, I came across a quote that so perfectly summed up the reason I felt (and continue to feel) drawn to that great city:

There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can "invoke" or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in…

--Michel de Certeau

It became apparent to me in the moment of reading this that it was exactly my sense of London as a place "haunted" by its social, political, and literary history that made me want to be a part of it. Before I had ever even visited, I had expectations about London gleaned from the pages of the books I'd read and loved -- everything from William Blake to Neil Gaiman -- and rather than being disappointed upon arrival that the London I actually saw was none of the Londons I'd read about, I felt even more at home there. It wasn't any of them, so it could be all of them, from Blake's grave at Bunhill Fields to all the names of tube stations cleverly reworked in Gaiman's Neverwhere. I didn't even have to go out of my way to find these associations; I was so steeped in the books that it just happened, I saw them everywhere (perhaps even where they weren't), and they made me feel like I belonged.

At the end of my year there, a friend and I ended up doing one of our projects about how our experience of "texts" -- defined loosely to include books, movies, television shows, songs, works of art, you name it -- had shaped our experience of London. It was a fascinating experience, deconstructing our own expectations and trying to trace them back to the source (my friend, for example, is pretty sure that his love of London began with movies like The Great Mouse Detective and Peter Pan; I, in a slightly more chagrined way, can probably attribute mine to my first encounter with Harry Potter).

It's almost a year since we finished that project -- almost a year since I left London -- and now that I'm leaving Berkeley, I'm beginning to realize that even though I never read anything significant involving Berkeley, the city was haunted for me in a different way. My father came to college here, and while I spent the better part of eighteen years being sure I didn't want to come to college here (long story short: I was stupid), I grew up with his stories about the place, and I always loved the way that they made me feel like I knew it. In the three years I've lived here, I've created a Berkeley of my own, separate from my father's, but still connected. Whenever I study in the North Reading Room of Doe Library, shifting in the the wooden chairs, I think of how he used to sit and study here. The other week, I celebrated the end of classes by getting lunch at the pizza place which used to be my dad's college hangout and which has survived the intervening years in style.

In the past few months, I've been thinking more about this concept of "haunting" in the face of my impending relocation to New York. I had a sense, before I ever visited, that New York would be like the London of the US -- not because it's a big city, or a central one, but because such a wealth of text surrounds it, and was bound to weigh upon my experience of it.

I've only spent five days there, but I'm inclined to think I was right. London and the British Isles still figure more prominently in my reading, but around the same time I ran into Harry Potter and kicked off that particular fascination, I discovered some other young wizards who began to haunt my idea of New York. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series -- beginning with So You Want to Be a Wizard -- follows a couple of teenage wizards living in the New York suburbs, making occasional trips into the city and usually getting caught up in some kind of adventure when they do. I had never been to New York City before March, but at that point Nita and Kit's New York had been a part of my imagination for about ten years, and at times I found their world suddenly superimposed over the one I saw before me: Grand Central played host to intergalactic travel, magical creatures lived in abandoned subway tunnels, and the statues in Central Park could be awakened to aid the virtuous in their time of need.

It's not quite the New York I'm moving to. But it's a pretty fabulous one in its own right -- and if it makes me feel somehow like I belong in this one, I can't complain.