Cold in a Wood - Margaret Christakos

Comments for The Book is Dead panel
Followed by “Cold in a Wood” text for 10 voices

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The end is near / The sky is falling / Your mother wears army boots.

Is the book dead or is it dying? Is it dead or is it cooked? Is it dead or is it disappeared?

The book-reader values stillness in the body, and uses books to build it.

“If it’s not online it’s invisible.”

Belief in only the visible. Odd to think that a material object like a book can slip into the category of imperceptibility, and that online virtuality is now conflated with what proves its own existence, what is seen thus known, real.

Is it more that we feel worried that the individual person engaged in reading slips into the unseen, unproven margin of an occult, a dangerous realm?

Reading is suspicious. Reading online is trackable.

Reading offline, reading a book, is clandestine, covert, suspicious, unregulated. Reading a book is engaging in mourning for traces of a past whose resurrection might prove revolutionary.

Books take us into the complex oddity of language as code.

What is language alone on the page? What is reading a book?

And further then, what is writing a book?

The declaration is dead for I can google you faster than you can say gauntlet.

The book is not a manifesto.

A book moves into subtlety as if subtlety matters.

A book attends to its own details and when you arrive you notice.

Language creeps in, like a worm, and feeds on your brain’s capacity for mind.

A book is your mind, without a plug.

Gulp, which is both the book’s interiority and collaboration’s exteriority, banal and socailly awkward, at first.

The plug is dead with the book, and the book does not care.

In a storm you can read a book.

On an isle you can burn a book or read it.

When your mother dies you can read the books she read to you during your childhood.

The book predates your own generation. The book was alive before you were even born.

The book knows your past and you don’t like that, do you?

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If the book is dead it does not worry me. Unless we begin to notice the widespread extinction of the notebook and sketchbook, the metonyms of thought and thinking, then I remain unstartled.

What is core to the manner of society I require is the hand, the sign of the individual, and this is the specific insignia one finds always in a temporal, spatial construct considerable as notebook or sketchbook, the process confabulations of the individual often assumed to be pertinent to the visual artist or architect and, when we consider it, also essentially active in the writer’s ongoing necessary thinking, gathering, collaging, comparing, curating, a process of contemplation, proposition, adjudication. In short: composition.

The notebook or sketchbook can assume a variety of material and formal incarnations; indeed it can occur as an electronic collage of postings and links; it can be files of scraps of paper and bills, ordered somehow, brought into spatial acrretion; it can be tattoed on the writer’s body; it can be scribbled, spraypainted, borrowed, coded and embedded into fictive or poetic writing.

What matters are the traces of individual hand and mind, embodied inscriptions of a specific point of view, a particular set of circumstantial preferences, through which diverse fragments and isolates are brought into adjacencies and productive overlayers.

The notebook, the sketchbook, even the pad, the datebook, the scrapbook, are the sites of composition that most guarantee the writerly practice that extends and reiterates anew the society I require. So, until we are yelling The Notebook is Dead, I will go on with the piece of writing I have been sketching with words no longer than 4-letters in length, to represent the constraint of the four-minute manifesto. 10 voices will read designated lines when appropriate from manuscripts drawn and ready. Shoot us down if you dare!

Cold in a Wood

The Book is Dead

7 June 2009

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Voice 1 11 21 31

Voice 2 12 22 32

Voice 3 13 23 33

Voice 4 14 24 34

Voice 5 15 25 35

Voice 6 16 26 36

Voice 7 17 27 37

Voice 8 18 28 38

Voice 9 19 29

Voice 10 20 30

Distributed and delivered on site 7 July 09

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1.

This is a soft time to test the room to see if the book is dead. Eat or sip

but chap loud when open.

1.

If it is time I need then how does my hand ache for page over

page or how each page will lick me back?

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2.

Some say it is not pure this hope for soft text to move onto

my skin and roll into some cute coil.

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3.

Some say book is dead meat rot and crud or even fake crap gold

and moss over by the door.

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4.

Well, I saw a tiny man who said he will take me by the nose to his lab.

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5.

He was tall too, and blue gray.

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6. AND 29.

He was also a nice girl.

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7.

His past knew how to sway and pull.

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8.

Soon I felt a fat odor plug it into time.

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9. AND 18. AND 24.

Time was a fuel pink and poor.

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10.

Now I hold the book like a pill on my gums so the rare leak of

each word runs into my body.

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11.

I know you are keen to eat it but won’t tell me to open what

you want most.

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12. AND 1.

You won’t tell me to open what you want most.

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13. AND 1. AND 2. AND 4.

Yeah well, you will not tell me to open what you want most so I know I

have to plan on your lies, how they will rule the game even as you know

what you may lose.

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14.

Okay, time is fuel for the book that can fill up self now, as it is a

gush here, for them, and read this text to the next lost skin you find.

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15.

If you meet any new lady or guy just keep your eyes to the

page, so safe, my dear, for the look is dead and don’t you know it.

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16 AND 3. AND 4. AND 1.

If fuel of the book is time then what does the body

of the book need to eat next?

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17. AND 5. AND 6. AND 7.

We only have one two or four.

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18. AND 1.

Book puts you to rest too, like its own skin, flat, open, guts, page

turn to page turn to page and stop.

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19.

Us hurt too lost to edit to read now over pain of need of some vein

of dope gin wine or work.

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20.

Out in a park lazy girl lean into damp rib of boy or girl.

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21.

On road one need eyes to see cops yank out of cave.

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21 AND 22.

In bed iris ice out and dark up.

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22. AND 23.

At café too much roar of plug exit and spur.

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23. AND 24.

By moon howl for lust heat or hate not text.

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24. AND 25. AND 26.

Past city edge too much slip of dust for hand dank over font.

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26. AND 8. AND 9.

We can’t get down the lane it’s so thin with plot.

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27.

If you see her in in her gray hair you will want to read her like a dead

dead book is held by near and over a fire .

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28.

At the end all the kids ate eat bugs and shat shit red bits of hats like

each mind was drip drib of ash fire.

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29. AND. 10. AND 11. AND 12. AND 13. AND 14.

What a pity pit.

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30.

They need a game or toy and some sort of test.

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31. AND 17. AND 8.

If the fuel of of the book book is time time then what does the

the body of the book need to eat eat next.

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32. AND 15.

One two two or four, last lose all.

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33. AND 16. AND 17. AND 18.

Oh, get up from the dirt.

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34.

Toss open a book and make your way to the end by noon or else.

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35.

Good to know how to stay with one line of text in case you

are left cold in a wood.

* *

36. AND 1. 37 AND 19. AND 20. AND 21.

If it is not real it will not bark, This is a test

that is how you know. do not stop your work.

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38. AND 23. AND 24. AND 25. AND 26. AND 27. AND 28. AND 29. AND 30. AND 31.

Tell me what you want most.

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32. AND 33. AND 34. AND 35. AND 36. AND 37. AND 38. AND 1. AND 2. AND 3. AND 4. AND 5. AND 6. AND 7. AND 8. AND 9. AND 10. AND 11. AND 12. AND 13. AND 14. AND 15. AND 16. AND 17. AND 18. AND 19. AND 20. AND 21. AND 22. AND 23. AND 24. AND 25. AND 26. AND 27. AND 28. AND 29. AND 30. AND 31.

Get me my coat I am cold cold and weak. So… Good bye.