As a young person, I bought into the idea that books were unalterable. I remember lying on the grass for hours  with an eraser, cleaning up my used copy of Herodotus's Histories, not wanting someone else's notes on his Greek or his content, offended that this previous owner had presumed to write on the book!

But in reality, we've been talking back to books for as long as... well, actually, for as long as farming and economies of scale gave us the free time to do so. The root of "scholar" and "school" means...

There's a couple posts still to come on the changing face of the book, but it's time to talk about objects. 

A big difference in today's bookscape from what went before lies in the material objectiveness of the book itself. Instead of a huge, ornate, unique work of art, a book now can exist solely in electronic form, immaterial in the sense that it's not composed of "matter."

I would suggest that when something is immaterial, non-physical object, it's less likely to be objectified. How appropriate, then, to go visit a touring exhibit of Buddhist relics, where the whole of devotion and spiritual consciousness is focused into pieces of body.

Back when, books were regarded as authoritative and unchangeable. Difference between one copy and another was "corruption," and scholars would quibble endlessly as to which was the true version.

Hence, "going by the book," "the rule book," "handbook" (which you keep close by so that you know exactly how to do something), "the Authorized version." "Bible" simply means "book," and there are still people who take every word of it literally, and who break out in hives at the idea that there are many more texts that could be legitimately included between its covers.
The static book infects all of our thinking.

What about bookmakers? Perhaps that's a Britishism. Digression:...

My beautiful new blog is still a new blog, and I'm still learning its outlines and characters. A couple days ago, I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a comment box--with comments in it awaiting my approval!

Comments are now live; please post comments!

And so, with humble apologies to those commenters, this post is all about comments, the word and the abstract object.

My eleven-year old self assumed as a matter of course that by the time I was a "grown-up" I'd have published several books.  In dark times, I've summoned up her spirit to belabor me because that's not the case.  Would she have been content with the mere handful of poems, essays, book reviews, one or two academic articles, and hundreds of blog posts published?

I appeal to her mercy: things are different now. She'd never heard of the Internet--makes me sound like a dinosaur, and I'm only in my thirties! Even aside from the book-like nature of a good blog, the world of books has changed.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I have a cautionary tale around use of herbs and use/trust of one's own intuition and strength today.

The more I look for synchronicities, the more I see them. I'm sure that's another tendency that's heightened by undertaking a 100-day Gong.

This cautionary herbal tale turns out to be also a tale about trusting your own strength, and about the relationship between process and product that all creative people dance around continually.