A House of Reading Dream and the New Media

by Richard Reeve on September 4, 2008

in AziMuth

AziMuth

We eat time here flipping paper pages of books.  Walking through the living room, the study, the hallways, the kids rooms… it becomes clear each year  that moving becomes less desirable simply due to the tonnage.  This is a house of reading.  And the practice employed here is to move through and across multiple books simultaneously following the interconnections of interest. Think of a crossword puzzle made with texts instead of words.  I gleaned this approach spending a few years immersed in the archive and library of the beat poet Charles Olson.  His interests were intense, broad, focused,…deep.  Olson glimpsed that the day would come when we would be able to have all that he so passionately desired without all the heavy lifting he went through to get it.  

Enter the unfolding power of the new media.  The content is just starting to reach that tipping point where a real Olsonian practice of poetics, or any type of engagement, can emerge.  If only we could get all the toll booths out of the way.  Imagine if we weren’t saddled with the disaster of copyrighting.  Notice how it limits access, and hence the development of human knowledge.   Hmm…  So radical as it might be I think we have to consider what it would take to get away from copyrighting and royalties as a system for reimbursement.  I dream that we could front end all the monetary transactions and set the texts free.  All of them.


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