Very much as a way of distracting from Billy's recent scowls, I thought
I'd mention (in connection with some listmembers' interest in the horizons
of web-presented poetry) an essay which perhaps many of us already know,
by Adorno -- 'Bibliographical Musings'.  About the very visceral
experience of handling, travelling with, owning and witnessing the
physical deterioration of books.  Interestingly, Adorno connects certain
features of modern book design with shifts in literary content, perhaps
principally the visual implication that the book as a commodity has been
designed to suggest that its information is no longer autonomous and
definitely collected.  The description he gives fits Lisa Robertson's
_Debbie_ almost exactly.  I remember speaking to Lisa about this, she said
that she had wanted to distinguish her work at the level of page layout,
and that this (though -perhaps- an afterthought -- she was not entirely
clear) would be an indicator of conscious modernity.  Her reaction did
seem to be against book design, rather than against outmoded semantic
possibilities considered more abstractly (I may be misrepresenting her);
though of course in a book like Debbie the former is fully constitutive
within the material set-up of the latter.  I wonder how the growing
consciousness of this involvement of book-design in semantic constitution
might be reflected in texts posted on the web?  Is it interesting to
suppose that web-presented texts pick up the history of text-presentation
at a point where the material and visual constitution of a text has
-already- been inducted into its semantic constitution by a wholly
different commodity-format?            

k



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