The Deconstructed Book
May 18, 2011
A bookmobile by Lisa Occhipinti
AN ESSAY ON BOOKMOBILES AND BOOK FURNISHINGS
by Steve Kogan
In her post “The Un-Read Book,” Laura Wood remarks that “there’s something profoundly unsettling about the use of books for interior decorating.” In themselves, books can certainly adorn a room and have been doing so for centuries, but, as Penelope Green of The New York Times observes, the latest “artwork” by Lisa Occhipinti turns them into ornamental “accents,” both inside and out, which complement “the activities of set designers and store stylists who are throwing around what are known as ‘book bundles’ – stitched and ripped old paperbacks in neutral colors – the way they used to set out green apples or lemons in a bowl.”
I belong to that generation when “they used to set out green apples or lemons in a bowl” (as did still life painters in even earlier times), and there was nothing edgy or hip about having classical music and interior decorating go hand in hand for the commercial appeal of the combination. This effect was promoted by the English actor John Williams, who played Chief Inspector Hubbard in Dial M for Murder (1954) and later hosted a successful TV ad for a box set of classical “hits” put out by Columbia Records. The faux highbrow staging of the set included a closeup of a harp, a bust of Beethoven behind the strings, and successive shots of a piano with a candelabra on top. As the strains of a classic-turned-pop began to play, Williams introduced the motif of the ad: “I”m sure you recognize this lovely melody as ‘Stranger in Paradise.’ But did you know that the original theme is from the Polovetsian Dance No. 2 by Borodin?” All that was missing was a bookcase of literature’s greatest hits to make the scene complete.
Despite its hokey furnishings, however, the ad returned “Stranger in Paradise” and other familiar pop songs to their original home in the past, thus arousing the audience’s curiosity in what used to be called “the finer things in life.” No such arousal is stimulated by Occhipinti’s “repurposed library,” which brings a whole new dimension to the postmodern devaluation of literature as she literally deconstructs books by ripping off their spines, coating the pages in beeswax, and curling and splaying them “like whorls of a nautilus shell.” With their fate sealed by the wax, these “artworks” go forth as new editions of what Green calls “the decorating cliché of the book bundle,” seen at “Restoration Hardware last year” and this year “at West Elm and Pottery Barn.”
All this reminds me of the remarkable essay “Books as Furniture,” by Nicholson Baker, which appeared in The New Yorker (June 12, 1995). Jonathan Hoefler calls him “the unchallenged master of profound minutiae,” here represented by Baker’s almost microscopic analysis of books and book titles gleaned from photographs of home furnishings in mail order catalogues for The Company Store, Crate & Barrel, Crabtree & Evelyn, J. Crew, Pier 1, the Horchow Home collection, See’s candies, Paragon, the Exemious of London (“exemious” he tells us “is an archaic word meaning ‘distinguished’ or ‘select'”), and most detailed of all, Pottery Barn, whose catalogue of March 1995 reveals “A closed universe of about fifty books” recycled as décor for home furnishings throughout its pages.
In every catalogue on which he trains his eye, Baker finds that books are “the prop of commonest resort.” He is particularly fascinated by The Pottery Barn catalogue’s library, which may have been selected for the alpha-wave-inducing beige and blue-gray and dull red of its bindings,” although “the actual titles, which are nearly but not quite unreadable, sometimes betray reserves of emotion. In the tranquillity of a cool living room, a cream-colored book entitled Tongues of Flame appears, minus its jacket, on its shelf of the Trestle Bookcase, near the Malabar Chair. Then it shows up in some peaceful shots of iron end tables. Next, on the page that offers what the Pottery Barn’s furniture-names call a Library Bed – ‘a bed whose broad panels suggest the careful woodworking found in old English libraries’ – a historical novel called A Rose for Virtue makes its quiet entrance, underneath a handsome ivory-toned telephone. Three pages later comes the big moment, the catalogue’s clinch: for, lying at the foot of the Scroll Iron Bench, as if it were being read, is a half-hidden volume that can be positively identified as Tongues of Flame, and leaning fondly, or even ardently, against it, at a slight angle, is A Rose for Virtue. Whether the rose’s virtue survives this fleeting flammilingus, we are not told. It’s enough to know that the two books, after their photographic vicissitudes, are together at last.”
Had “Books as Furniture” ended here, its opening paragraphs would have been a treasure in themselves, in which Baker elevates one corner of our commercialized culture to a fine point of consciousness, the one that bombards us with what the genius of American English has aptly termed “junk mail,” out of which Baker turns dross to gold. His irrepresible curiosity and love of the written word create the alchemical medium that makes this happy transformation possible. It is the exact opposite of what Occhipinti does with “orphaned books,” the kind that “you can find by the box load at thrift stores and flea markets,” when in fact all you have to do is read one to give it a home.
The very idea of “books as furniture” leads Baker to hunt down the rare book whose title in mail order ads he has managed to read. On his first quest, he takes an elevator in “a big library” down to “the lowest level of the underground stacks,” and in this most obscure realm of forgotten novels he finds The Woodcarver of ‘Lympus, a title that “just barely” crossed “the threshold of decipherability” in a photo from The Company Store.
In recounting his problem, he tells us that “The catalogue designer has reversed the negative,” so that “the letters are backward, and the words they spell out are partly covered by a finger.” It is the finger of a woman whose “book is lying open face down on a white-pajamaed thigh – the thigh, it seems, of the woman who was first seen pillowfighting on the cover. Now she is alone, lost in a fiction-inspired reverie” midway through “The Woodcarver of ‘Lympus, published in 1904 and written by someone named Mary E. Waller.”
The second time he goes to the library, he finds Tongues of Flame by Mary Ward Brown, published by Dutton in 1986.
In his synopsis of the title story, a married woman attempts to reform a drunkard by taking him to church, a program that seems to work until “one evening the preacher delivers a sermon so potent it sends the alarmed man right back to the bottle; in a matter of hours, his clumsy cigarette-smoking has set fire to the church.” In her piece on Occhipinti’s “artwork,” Green notes that some of her home-accessorized “book bundles” can resemble “burned and water-soaked books,” a fate from which the Good Book and other religious works in Tongues of Flame are spared as one of the parishioners cries out, “Save the Bible!” Baker then quotes from the tale: “The wet pulpit, with the Bible still on it, had been brought out into the churchyard. Pews sat haphazardly about. Songbooks, Sunday School books, and Bible picture for children were scattered on the grass,” presumably drying out in the sun.
Thus begins an inspired search that was triggered by “the color coordinating book lovers at Pottery Barn,” for if not for them, “I would never have read Mary Ward Brown’s short story. . . . Nor would I ever have troubled to determine which hymn it is that contains the simple but stirring phrase ‘tongues of flame.'” In this second of five ever-widening links and associations, Baker discovers the phrase in “‘Father of Boundless Grace,’ by the prolific Charles Wesley (Methodist, brother of John Wesley, and inspirer of William Blake) . . . probably written sometime in the 1780s”:
A few from every land
At first to Salem came
And saw the wonders of Thy hand,
And saw the tongues of flame
Curious myself, I discover that Wesley’s “tongues of flame” alludes to the day of Pentecost in The Acts of the Apostles 2:3-4: “And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.”
It took “the color coordinating book lovers at Pottery Barn” to set Baker on his upward journey through five incarnations of “tongues of flame”; but if the online photograph at Restoration Hardware’s Antiquated Uncovered Book Bundles is true to type, he could not have found a legible letter, let alone a title in them, for they are no longer books but merely “antiquarian accents,” although taken singly, they can just as well be modernized.
This may be one of Occhipinti’s contributions to the trend, as in a work of hers that I found at garagesalesgirly.blogspot titled “Bookmobile,” not by allusion to the camper-style vehicles that serve as traveling libraries for small communities but as a hanging mobile that suggests the wind-swept tail of a kite. At the top of this book-in-flight, what look like blank book covers hang suspended from the spine in the form of a peaked roof or the top half of a diamond kite, while the book’s blank, curled up, and cascading pages pour down in an ever-narrowing arc.
According to the caption, this bookmobile “was created using a 1943 book” that has now been “recycled as a piece of art.” If it happened to be Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, each one “a 1943 book,” we would have before us an actual work of literature that had been physically deconstructed into a sterile “piece of art.”
For the philosophically trendy shopper, I can see how it would be no ordinary novelty but the last word on the indeterminacy of language in postmodern thought: the book bundle as the wordless made flesh. Even the purchase would have a postmodern edge to it, since the title and words of the book as “Bookmobile” have been upscaled into oblivion, so that we can never know what book it was, nor if it really was “a 1943 book.” The purported help below the photograph is also worthless (“the seller actually knows the title”), and it is pointless to read the included “brief summary of the novel,” for the only thing real is the sale.
— Comments —
John P. writes:
I don’t know why exactly but I find that ‘bookmobile’ thing physically nauseating. Really. It’s like the skeleton of some pre-historic fish. It gives me the willies.
It’s odd what some people consider to be art objects.
Laura writes:
There’s nothing beautiful about it. There isn’t even an interesting pattern to the bent pages. But it’s conceptual art and therefore its ugliness contributes to its interest.
It’s ironic because books themselves are often very visually beautiful. A shelf of books, provided they are not the sort of bestsellers that are in candy colors and have large, blaring letters on the covers, is interesting and evocative. I feel more at peace in a room lined with books – unless they’re sets of books and all the books look the same.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
Steve Kogan has done a very nice job with his essay on so-called deconstructed books. He confirms my gut-reaction to the phenomenon: that we have long since entered the dismal era of post-literacy and are doomed to witness its increasing petulance and stultification until catastrophe overwhelms us. I find the disfigured books to be wicked, as in evil, but that there was always something wicked or evil in the vehement project called deconstruction.
The name of H. G. Wells, which has been mentioned more than once at The Thinking Housewife, becomes relevant again. His Time Machine, as adapted for the screen in 1960 by filmmaker George Pal, has a poignant scene involving books and literacy. In Wells’ novel – and in Pal’s film – the Time Traveler uses his machine to seek out the future, ending up in the year 802,701 A.D., where he discovers that humanity has split into two species – the childlike Eloi and the frightening, troglodytic Morlocks. The Morlocks prove to be herders and cullers of the Eloi. But before the film reveals this, Pal directs his star Rod Taylor to interact with the Eloi, whose insouciance and passivity trouble him deeply.
In this sequence (The Time Machine Part 6), the Time Traveler first rescues a girl, Weena, from drowning and then interviews her on the steps of the marble edifice in which the Eloi live. Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux, is disturbingly ingenuous. Key moments in the sequence are the question, put by Taylor to Mimieux, “Aren’t you the least bit interested in who I am?” (5.05 into the clip); the question put by Taylor to a male of the Eloi, “Do you have books?” (8.57 into the clip); and the private remark, uttered by Taylor, that, “Yes [these books] do tell me all about you” (9.47 into the clip). The sequence continues (The Time Machine Part 7) with Taylor’s outrage at the intellectual and moral delinquency of the Eloi.
Weena looks and acts like many of the coeds in my college classes; the male Eloi are just as emotionally detached, but somewhat better behaved than my male college students.
Laura writes:
These deconstructed books are surreal. They’re similar to the slut walks in that they are so low, so barbaric and, yes, so wicked, as Mr. Bertonneau says, that they are almost unworthy of notice. But they aren’t surreal. They are part of reality.
