Prolificacy & The Book as Art

Where is everybody? I suppose it does get harder to maintain a blog when you are stuck between the crushing weight of midterms and the prospective freedom of spring break. Lucky enough not to have midterms, I managed to find a few blips in the mainstream media that may interest the class:

First, Geoff Nicholson's editorial in the New York Times entitled "Can't. Stop. Writing." Musing on authors labeled "prolific," Nicholson tries to determine where productivity can entail too much of a good thing. He quotes James Gibbons as saying "The truly prolific author, as distinct from the merely respectably productive one, is either a genre writer or a relic." The idea here is that in today's world literary respect and prolificacy are often mutually exclusive - unlike in the 19th century, where Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope got the best of both worlds.

Nicholson drops some pretty astounding numbers in respect to genre writers who broke world records with their output (we're talking close to a 1,000 books written in less than a lifetime). But he also considers some of the literary talents of the postmodern and contemporary era; Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anthony Burgess both have an impressive number of books under their names, and Thomas Pynchon has oh so few. Yet, I would argue, John Updike is a little more digestible than Thomas Pynchon. Imagine tomes such as Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day appearing on bookshelves at a rate of 1 or 2 a year. Could the literary community read that quickly? I agree with Nicholson's final summation that creative output is almost out of the writer's control, at least when it reaches extreme levels. And I especially agree with Nicholson's theory that "perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope, naïve perhaps, that we’ll make a better job of it next time. Unless you’re a genius or a fool, you realize that everything you write, however 'successful,' is always a sort of failure. And so you try again."

Next up is an exhibit on books as art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (at BC) that was pointed out to me by the Boston Globe. Apparently artists have taken to transforming books into miniature pieces of art - kind of like origami. I would be interested in seeing this exhibit, but I also wonder - how long before this mode is mass manufactured for sale in quirky little art stores, if it hasn't been already? The themes of the transformed books seem to have been incorporated into some of the pieces, though this idea could be taken to whole new levels - for example, a house for The House of the Seven Gables or an axe for Crime and Punishment. Or to return to our friend Thomas Pynchon, a mini V-2 rocket for Gravity's Rainbow. If these were manufactured, would the publishing industry be involved? I guess this is silly conjecture at this point, but the idea does seem lucrative. What if, instead of displaying your favorite books next to one another on a shelf, you had them sitting in their own displays as pieces of art?