Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Keep Watching the Sky



"Books are not dispersed but assembled." Georges Perec's "Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One's Books" identifies key problems in the classification, assembling, and arranging of one's books. Ideas are proposed and abandoned, one after another, their limits reached; books are instead meta-classified in terms of their relative ease of classification. Though "we would like to believe that a unique order exists" — one that is not only unique, but ideal, such that it "would enable us to accede to knowledge all in one go" — we instead resort to arrangement's opposite, hoping "that order and disorder are in fact the same thing, denoting pure chance."

And, in a belated follow-up to Perec's analysis, Anne F. Garréta has proposed a few principles according to which one's library might be arranged. Though, unlike Perec, she goes so far as to devise concrete systems for organization, her essay shares with his an interest not in classification itself, but its limits. This is evident in her fanciful principles, most of which resist the universalizing and rationalizing impulses of, say, the Dewey Decimal system, and share more, in the end, with Sei Shōnagon's idiosyncratic organizational schemata.
PRINCIPLE #6
— books in which one encounters whales;
— books in which not even the shadow of a whale is to be found;
— books from which have disappeared, inexplicably, the whales one imagined there.
Each of Garréta's principles — ten in all — amounts, in the end, to an imaginative way of articulating the et cetera against which all classificatory systems necessarily run, despite their efforts to the contrary.

Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Book project enacts a further way of thinking organization. Rather than categorizing books according to similarities of content, Katchadourian groups books by their titles, treating them as fragmentary phrases which can be arranged more or less syntactically. The library, then, becomes a re-combinatory literary work unto itself — a sort of cento.

• Books are grouped into a summary or loose interpretation of another title:
"King Lear / Old Age is Contagious, But... / If I'm in Charge Here, Why Is Everybody Laughing?"

• Sometimes one title comes to define another:
"Cindy Sherman / A Harlot High and Low."
"The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography / The Naked Ape."

• Other groups work as highly paratactic poems, or shot-by-shot accounts of a film:
"A Day at the Beach / The Bathers / Shark 1 / Shark 2 / Shark 3 / Sudden Violence / Silence."


The most interesting of Katchadourian's groupings finds titles placed into their own systems of classification, such that the first title provides a rubric for gathering those that follow: "Tales of Unnatural and Natural Catastrophes / Dante's Inferno / The Flight of Icarus." "Kinds of Love / Ecstasy / Sensation / Distemper." "The Secret Language of Dreams / Fences and Gates / Queues, Rendezvous, Riots / Picnic, Lightning / Swimming Pools." Where most organizational orders are imposed from without — particularly in the cases where order relies on preconceived classes of knowledge (as is the case with the Dewey Decimal system) or genre — these strange and provisional categories are especially interesting in that their schemata emerge from within, and are dispersed within, the field to be classified.




["On Bookselves" by Anne F. Gerréta was published in The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo, one of the three volumes bound by Athanasius Kircher's "secret knots" as McSweeney's 22.

Perec's essay is, of course, included in
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.]



6 comments:

suzanne said...

there's also the chris cobb method: by color.

this link's an image of his reorganization of Adobe Books in san francisco [each one carefully tagged for later re-sortment. or 'restorement']

أخبار مصر اليوم said...

أخبار مصر اليوم اهم الاخبار المصرية والعربية أولا باول بين يديك كل الاخبار المصرية من أخبار سياسية رياضية أخبار اجتماعية أخبار فنية أخبار التعليم ونتائج الامتحانات نتيجة الثانوية العامة نتيجة الشهادة الابتدائية والاعدادية الى جانب العديد من الاخبار المنوعة الاخبار العربية والعالمية أخبار مصر اليوم الخبر فى لحظة بين يديك .

فاتورة التليفون ـ اذاعات عربية ـ قنوات فضائية ـ العاب ترفيهية ـ دردشة مصرية شات مصرى ــ صور

Anonymous said...

thank you

منتديات مصر توداى said...


مشاهدة قناة الجزيرة مصر بث مباشر اون لاين بدون تقطيع


منتديات مصر توداى


مصر توداى


اخبار مصر اليوم


اخر اخبار مصر

online bookie said...

excellent article learn a lot

gamezawy said...

العالب كراش الان علي موبيلك حملها الان وتمتع حل كلمات كراش والاستفادة من جميع فيديوهات القناه التي تقدم العاب وحلول متنوعه حيث اننا نوفر لعبة كراش الان من خلال قناتنا علي اليوتيوب .

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