It's time for the annual presentation of items from the archive at the AfterMAF Anti-Festival in Roanoke, VA (organised by myself).
This year's talk is Practical Bibliomancy: Haunted Books and Reading with the Dead.
It's derived from one that I gave at the CHS Lycée a couple years ago.
Why choose to read out of an ancient, dusty, musty, ragged, worm-eaten, dog-eared, foxed, torn, water-stained, book full of other people's underlines, notes, dedications, and coffee-stains from the past century or two, when you could read it from a pure, shiny, glowing telephone or laptop screen? Let's find out.
A library is to a Bibliomancer what a graveyard is to a Necromancer: a field of corpses with something to say.
A few years ago, a floating table declared that the Revenant Archive is haunted. There are obvious arguments against the objective truth of this claim; but true or false, what is certain is that physical books age and die just like the people who read and love them, and bear the traces of all those previous lives. To people who live their lives through reading and writing, a book is an extension of their body and thought. If we know how to "read" beyond the text, these books themselves can allow us to listen to the dead, spy on them, resurrect pieces of their daily lives, environment, personalities, even let them momentarily "possess" our bodies and learn how they preferred to sit, stand, think and read.
We will look at a collection of books between 100 and 225 years old, including some that were singled out as "haunted" in that seance and others equally eerie. All of them are bursting with the personalities of their previous readers, some in advanced stages of decay, others suspended in states of partial preservation. We'll examine the traces of those dead and evoke their presence, calling up the sights, scents, words, thoughts, habits, and physical peculiarities of them and their vanished world, to give them a fleeting presence once more in the midst of the modern world.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment