Notional Slurry

Wells on the difference between utterance and dialogue

June 17, 2006 at 12:14 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Of a Book Unwritten

Accomplished literature is all very well in its way, no doubt, but much more fascinating to the contemplative man are the books that have not been written. These latter are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to turn over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a candle. Turning to another topic, primitive man in the works of the descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very entertaining and quaint person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would appeal to us more strongly. Yet where are the books? As Ruskin has said somewhere, à propos of Darwin, it is not what man has been, but what he will be, that should interest us.

What will a book be, when it has been published? Something new, I think. Many people don’t seem to understand that. Branko, some others — they do.

Let’s see what we can do about spreading that understanding.

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Branko Collin said,

June 27, 2006 @ 9:45 am

Branko was, as is not unusual with him, suffering from brainfuzz. Ideas kept flitting through his head like unruly butterflies, and none could be caught and pinned to his blog.

And so in the end I took the sly and easy way out, and let Wells do the work for me. One thought remained: “juxtaposition purdy” (you really need to read my entry to understand, as Bill quoted only half of it).

If that means I understand the unwritten book, there’s only one thing I can say: I rule!

As for one of the ideas I tried to pin down with this particular quote: it struck me that when Wells wrote “[unwritten books] are no trouble to hold; there are no pages to turn over. One can read them in bed on sleepless nights without a candle,” he could have been writing about the mechanical qualities of e-books too.