Crumbs
Reading and Random – Woolf’s exploration of inventing a new form for the literary essay.
The following is a fragment of speculative theory. It is a work-in-process updated and edited as new findings are discovered.
Ideas for the shape of the book.
To begin with the country. The eye the youthful
sense. Our floods. This brings back the wildness.
Out of doors. Indoors. no study no library.
Songs sung at the door.
The importance of the audience.
No public, in our sense.
Anonymity.
The song . . the call to our primitive instincts.
Rhythm- Sound. Sight.
Harrison: at the right distance, at last, to see England. No one looked before that. Piers Ploughman. (after Chaucer)
Notes for ‘Reading at Random’ Virignia Woolf, 1939
One thing overlooked with VW is that I keep going back to the accusation about her coming full circle, from ‘society’ to bohemian and back again. That her experiments with both art and life failed. First, I see her willingness to go through a process of finding her/their way as a lifetime commitment that never wavered. Second, what they found was not unconditionally normative and conservative, in line with the values of society. I disagree on the grounds of their romances, friendships, and financial management systems. Returning again and again over a lifetime to the same questions, being open enough to change positions, even if they are opposing positions, I view as a commitment to a value of finding new forms, attending to desires in ways that let go of conventions itself – being mindful of intention an desire is radical in all circumstances. As for the writing – no one argues the form did not evolve by her hand, but
An early draft: The Un/Common Reader
In the decade before the publication of Three Guineas in 1938, Virginia Woolf collected images, news clippings, notes, and excerpts to explore. Woolf experimented with combining words, images, and layout to discover a new critical essay writing method. She referred to this process as a means to find a new form of coming to know something. Her concern was with how resources (guineas) and knowledge acquisition and exchange (education and critical thinking) were intermingled with gender and war. In Three Guineas Woolf strategically placed images at specific junctures between words and paragraphs to guide the reader visually in addition to verbally. In essays such as ‘How to Read a Novel’, ‘Women and Fiction’, and ‘How it Strikes and Contemporary’, Woolf prompts us, her readers, to follow our senses, follow the threads of work on their own terms, be cautious of how we come to know what we know, as the hedges and towers that move us in one direction or another reproduce a gulf that maintains disparities in access to education and capital.
The collaging method throughout Routes and P(l)aces is implemented to learn from Woolf’s and other feminist experimentation techniques, following them like an artist trains through copying a master’s painting. Page design and writing style all draw on an ongoing feminist practice of zine-making, scrapbooking, and collecting recipes torn from magazines. This format has been chosen as it is part of a continuity of a practical way of collecting and sharing personal-collective anarchives of what matters most to us through self-publication and custodianship. These kitchen-table operations are much of a hobby as they are tools for creating and recalling a self-directed life. We learn from these sources, playing with how the format most makes sense to us, as individuals, and for our audiences, whether family, friends, future generations, or a general public we care to communicate with on our terms through our methods. These low-stakes environments provide intergenerational continuity, growth, and an accumulation of knowledge that is otherwise marginalised due to its unconventional format. Not dissimilar from the Woolf’s intention at the Hogarth Press as hobby with publications circulating by subscription among friends.
The Routes and Places anarchive has been designed at a width of 900px – this was selected as it provides readers on tablets and desktops a uniform size to encounter the text in. However, if this is read on a phone – as is likely the case for many who use QR codes found in the print zine – they have a different experience. It is an experience of scrolling through contained images and texts, of reading through longer form essays and fieldnotes. The user interface of this, the Route Haunting anarchive blends Visual branding (color, font, background), print media (such as this notepad paper background), and with the wireframes and content sequence social media platform provide. Some content is missing – there is no space for response (comments, emoticons), nor are some technologies for web and tablet platforms available to phone devices (including VR content requiring goggles).
It is not in the scope of this project to produce a qualitative study of user experience, what is in the scope is accountability to what has been accomplished here in research design and demonstrated in design practice. I know a UX designer or two may be interested in having a conversation about this …
