(I have a bug in my ear about a particular project that I’d sketched, kind of forgot about, rediscovered, and keep on revolving around to. Lucky you, you get to hear about it.)
Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards, and this enabled him to create wonderfully nonlinear books. One of my favorites is Pale Fire, a book that manages to tell three stories at once, written as the critical analysis of an autobiographical poem.
If that description sounds about as much fun as being repeatedly punched in the balls by circus midgets while alphabetizing census records, I assure you that it is anything but.
In any case, I’d like to take Pale Fire (which is sort of about, and definitely revolves around, an autobiographical poem written in pencil on index cards), and make an edition of it with the poem printed both traditionally (in the first section), and also on index cards. These would be spread through the pages of the book, which is ostensibly a criticism of the poem itself (although it isn’t really, and the book should certainly be read to see why).
What makes the idea seductive to me is that you could easily use semacodes to link the cards (and individual notes on the poem’s stanzas in the “commentary” pages) to an online, networked version. I imagine it as being like a blog, with wiki-style comments.
If done correctly, the result would be a networked book, on paper.
Why?
Well, since there are many possible ways to read the book, and no real authorial word on which is the “true” story, the reader would be invited to join the commentary and argument over the book. This might provide a different way of engaging the story than reading and even discussing the “dumb” paper version.
In addition, the paper itself provides affordances for physical annotation, offline reading, and mixed media, with the additional interest of the poem’s “original” itself being provided along with the printed version.
(Incidentally, this would also fulfill a long-standing geek dream of mine: I’d love to be able to trackback-ping a passage from a paper book I’m reading, from my blog. And see the trackback when I reread the book.)
It would also be a wonderful interaction- and graphic-design problem to solve. With index cards. And data shadows.
The concept is an attractive nuisance. I really can’t let it go, but I really have no idea how to go about getting the rights to do so. Pale Fire is, after all, still under copyright. And I’m not a printer, by any means. But damn, I can’t let the idea go.
This is what happens when I empty out a month or two’s worth of photographs from my camera at once…
